Junge Frauen am Strand (Reinhardt-Fries)

Max Reinhardt opened his Kammerspiele theatre in Berlin in 1906, and Munch was in at the start, making designs for its production of Ibsen's Ghosts. Reinhardt then asked him for paintings for the upstairs foyer, the room where the audience stood between the acts. Munch worked through 1906 and 1907 and handed over 12 panels that December, painted in tempera on rough unprimed canvas so the surface stays matt, closer to watercolour than to oil. They hung right up under a ceiling nearly five metres high, and they came down in 1912 when the room was rebuilt. After that the frieze was split up. Nine panels are now in the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, one is in Essen, one is in private hands in Oslo, and this one, girls in white on a shore with a single figure in red standing apart from them, went to Hamburg.