Canal in Warnemünde

In a letter to his aunt Karen Bjølstad in 1907, Munch called Warnemünde “a German Åsgårdstrand”. Åsgårdstrand was the small village on the Oslofjord where he had spent his summers since 1889, painting its trees, its shoreline and the people walking beside the water, and on the Baltic he had found something like it again. This canvas is from his second summer there, 1908. It stands more than a metre tall but is only 67 centimetres wide, an upright shape for a landscape. A row of thin, bare-branched trees fills the lower half, and through them lies the water with a small boat carrying two figures. Above that the far bank and the sky are laid in as broad horizontal bands and long sweeping strokes. The picture is unsigned, and the Munch Museum keeps several other canal views from the same year beside it, among them Canal at Sunset and Canal with Dark Clouds.