It is late afternoon on the Ekeberg hill above Kristiania, the city we now call Oslo. A road runs along the ridge with a wooden fence on the fjord side, and below it the water lies flat and dark, holding the last desperate glimpse of light the way a hand holds a coin it has decided not to spend. Three men are walking; the third, a painter not yet thirty, has begun to fall behind. The sun is going down, as it does every evening, but on this very evening the sunset has a different colour, the colour of the inside that dwells inside someone’s soul. His friends walk on. He stops at the fence and leans on it, tired to death; the sky seems to have turned blood red, as if tongues of fire were above the fjord, and a scream was going through nature, and he could not say from where.
He does not run away. He is a man too tired to run, and still a man who stands his post.
He comes back. In 1892, he paints…
