Munch’s painting shows several couples dancing in a luminous summer night. The central element of the composition is a couple, of whom the woman is wearing a bright red dress that wraps itself around the feet of her dancing partner. Her loose hair swirling about him, they seem to become a single entity. This couple is flanked by two other women, one of them young and radiant in a white dress, the other pale, with sunken cheeks and dressed in black. It is as if a story were being told about various stages in a woman’s life. Munch has set the scene on the seashore, a landscape with elements from Åsgårdstrand. Many of the pictures in Munch’s protracted “Frieze of Life” project were inspired by Åsgårdstrand’s curving shoreline and characteristic landscape.