The Girl by the Window

In the early 1890s, in Berlin, Edvard Munch painted a series of solitary figures seen against windows and balconies, images of longing and entrapment that belong to the same intimate world as his great *Scream*. This picture of a girl standing at a tall window dates from 1893, the year of the *Frieze of Life*, and shows the young woman with her hands at her sides, facing a view of roofs and water in which the whole drama of the interior is concentrated. The steep perspective, the heavy frame and the pale, unmodelled face set the mood of silent expectation that runs through the artist’s most personal works; the window, at once an opening and a barrier, is one of the central motifs of his symbolist period. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.