Bathing Man

The shore behind this man is probably Hvitsten, a small resort on the Oslo Fjord where Munch had bought a property called Nedre Ramme in the late autumn of 1910. By then the village had bathing huts along its beaches, and Munch wrote to his aunt Karen that it was almost the most beautiful place on the whole coast. The likely spot is a wide bay not far from his house. The model was Claude Beriot, a dancer who had also posed for the sculptor Gustav Vigeland, which accounts for the trained body. Munch neither signed nor dated the canvas. Its year comes from a wider version with the same figure and background that he signed in 1918. In 1927, when the National Gallery in Oslo held a large retrospective of his work, he gave it this picture. It still has its original frame, made together with the painting, its gold and blue picking up the colours of the body and the sea.