Strandlandschaft mit Bäumen und Booten

1905 was the year Norway dissolved its union with Sweden, and through that summer both countries expected a war that in the end did not come. Munch spent it at Aasgaardstrand, the small shore town south of Kristiania where he had taken his summers since the 1880s and had bought a cottage in 1898. It ended in a fistfight with the younger painter Ludvig Karsten. Munch left the country afterwards and stayed away, moving between German spa towns and clinics. That shoreline, with its low trees and the boats pulled up on the sand, had been his standing subject for 20 years. He did not settle in Norway again until 1909, after a breakdown and eight months in a Copenhagen clinic.