Am Strom, Warnemünde

In the summer of 1907 Munch left the noise and quarrels of the cities and took rooms in Warnemünde, a small resort on the German Baltic coast. He rented from a harbour pilot at number 53 on the street called Am Strom, which runs along the old channel where the fishing boats came in. That channel is what he painted here. He had come for the sea air and at first felt, in his own word, reborn, swimming off the beach and painting bathing men in the hard northern light. The calm did not last. Across 1908 the summer crowds, old suspicions and heavy drinking wore him down, and he painted this working waterfront during his final months in the town, before he left that October for Copenhagen and eight months in a nerve clinic.