View from Nordstrand by Edvard Munch

Matthew Parris is a political writer, broadcaster and former Conservative MP. His new book, Fracture: Stories of How Great Lives Take Root in Trauma , is out this autumn

‘I first saw this picture at the age of 21, in a giftpainting, I knew almost nothing about Munch and would not have recognised the term Expressionism. But this painting expressed! I bought a framed reproduction and it still hangs in my house. In its way, the painting is a kind of scream from the forest, but a scream not of despair, but of exuberant individuality. Among conifers, only the larch goes russet in autumn, bare in winter and golden in spring. In that painting’s forest, the tree is the gay eccentric in the room. But there’s something baleful about the offshore islands. I have planted more than 50 larches on our land’