Childhood

Munch spent 18 months at Warnemünde on the German Baltic coast, from May 1907 until October 1908, renting rooms in a harbour pilot's house on the street along the water. He worked on the beach where the men bathed naked, carrying his easel down and undressing along with everyone else. One of the men who posed for him there the summer before was the town's bathing master, who was suspended from his post for it. This canvas comes from his last months in Warnemünde, and the figure on that beach is a child, naked, standing full length in the open. In October 1908 he packed up, wrote that the town was too bourgeois to suit him, and went on to Copenhagen, into a nerve clinic he did not leave until the spring. He kept the picture, and it came to Oslo with the more than 1,000 paintings he left the city when he died in 1944.