Bathing Girls

In 1898 Munch bought a small house in Åsgårdstrand, a summer village on the Oslofjord that he had known since the 1880s. In those same years, between 1897 and 1899 by the Munch Museum's dating, he kept returning to people bathing off that shore. There are bathing boys, bathing children and bathing women, and this picture of girls out in the water.

Norwegian art historians have read these bathers as an early sign of vitalism, the belief that took hold around 1900 that sunlight and sea water filled the body with fresh life. Munch stayed with the subject. In 1907, on the German Baltic coast at Warnemünde, he painted grown men bathing on a much larger scale. A year earlier, the Swiss critic William Ritter had chosen this canvas as one of the plates in his book on the painter.