Bathing Man

By 1918 Munch was 54 and living on an estate outside Kristiania, as Oslo was then called. The bathing men had begun a decade earlier on the German Baltic coast at Warnemuende, where he spent two summers painting naked men on the sand and in the water, and bathed that way himself. There was a fashion behind it. Open-air bathing and sun exposure were being pushed across northern Europe as a treatment for weak lungs and frayed nerves, and the beaches he worked on were full of people taking the cure. This canvas is nearly two metres wide, and he came back to the subject ten years after leaving that coast. He signed and dated it 1918, and it went on public view three years later at the Blomqvist gallery in Kristiania.