Beach with two Seated Women

In 1904 Munch delivered a set of canvases to Max Linde, an eye doctor in Lübeck who had become his steadiest buyer. They showed the shore at Åsgårdstrand, the small town on the Oslofjord where Munch had bought a cottage in 1898, and they were painted for the room of Linde's four sons. Linde sent them back. The subjects, he decided, were unsuitable for children. Germany was otherwise treating Munch well that year. He signed with the Hamburg dealer Commeter for his paintings and with the Berlin publisher Bruno Cassirer for his prints, and he was made a member of the Berlin Secession. This canvas carries the same year and the same stretch of coast, two women sitting on the curving line of shore that runs through his Åsgårdstrand pictures from the 1890s onward.