Beach Landscape with Trees and Boats

In the summer of 1905 Munch's life in Åsgårdstrand, the small town on the Oslofjord where he had spent most summers and owned a house since 1898, came apart. After a fight with the painter Ludvig Karsten he left the town in a hurry and did not come back for about four years. This canvas, dated 1905 to 1906, holds on to the Åsgårdstrand shore he had been painting for more than a decade: tall trunks standing in front of the beach, and the boats of the title out on the evening water. The Munch Museum keeps a second version at the same size, painted in distemper straight onto unprimed canvas rather than in oil. That raw, matte surface is how he worked in Berlin in 1906 and 1907 on a frieze for the director Max Reinhardt's theatre, and trees by the sea turn up there too, in a panel now at the Neue Nationalgalerie.