Canal in Warnemünde

In May 1907 Edvard Munch arrived in Warnemünde, a small fishing town and seaside resort on the German Baltic coast, and rented a fisherman's house at Am Strom 53. That street runs along the old river channel where the local boats tie up, the canal in this picture. He stayed about 18 months. This view comes from his second summer, 1908. The white sails of the moored boats are seen through a row of dark tree trunks that run straight up the canvas from bottom to top, with the far bank a thin band behind them. That summer Munch was also at work on his large canvas of naked men bathing on the beach. By the autumn he was calling Warnemünde dreadfully bourgeois, and soon afterwards he collapsed in Copenhagen and spent months in the private clinic of the doctor Daniel Jacobson. The fisherman's house on Am Strom still stands and now takes in visiting artists.