Childhood

At Warnemünde, a German resort on the Baltic where he spent much of 1907 and 1908, Munch worked on a theme he would call the Ages of Life. Its centrepiece was a large canvas of naked men striding out of the sea, standing for manhood, and in Helsinki in 1911 he hung it between a picture of youth and one of old age. Childhood had no place in that triptych. It turns up in separate pictures instead, among them this small oil on a wooden panel, about 32 by 44 centimetres. A naked boy is down on all fours in the sand, head lowered, with the sea laid in behind him as flat bands of green and lilac, and the foreground is little more than a row of quick pink strokes. The Munch Museum lists it among works related to the youth and old-age pictures from those same months.