Children on the Street

1906 was a German year for Munch. He was 42 and living mostly abroad, taking cures at the spa town of Bad Kosen for his nerves and his drinking, working in Weimar, and in the autumn preparing the stage sets in Berlin for Ibsen's Ghosts, the play Max Reinhardt chose to open his new Kammerspiele on 8 November. That commission, and the frieze he painted for the same building the year after, are what the year is usually remembered for. This canvas, about 75 by 90 centimetres, he never signed. It stayed in his own hands to the end, and when he died in 1944 his will left everything he still owned to the city of Oslo, more than a thousand paintings among it, which is how it came to the Munch Museum.