Bathing Young Men

In the summer of 1904 Munch organised what amounted to a health holiday for a few friends at Åsgårdstrand, the small bathing place on the Oslo fjord where he had bought a fisherman's cottage six years earlier. He wrote to his young relative Ludvig Ravensberg, a painter who often travelled with him, about a huge canvas ready to be populated by the strong men wandering among the waters, and added that they were training their muscles by swimming, boxing and throwing rocks. The canvas is this one, nearly three metres across, and the men in it stand about on the rocks and in the shallows with nothing on. Naked bathing and hard exercise belonged to vitalism, a current of the period that treated sun, sea air and physical training as medicine. When the painting was done Munch had it carried out into his garden at Åsgårdstrand and photographed it there, with Ravensberg holding the canvas upright.