Garden in Lübeck

Munch spent stretches of 1902 and 1903 in Lübeck, on the Baltic, as the guest of Max Linde. Linde was an eye doctor who had published a book about him the year before, kept buying his work, and commissioned a portfolio of etchings of his own house, garden and children. So Munch had been drawing north German gardens for months before he painted this one. The timing is worth knowing. In the late summer of 1902 a revolver went off during his final meeting with Tulla Larsen and cost him a finger joint, and the self-portrait he made in 1903 shows him naked and alone in hell. This garden is green, sunlit and completely untroubled. In 1903 Linde also ordered a monumental cast of Rodin's Thinker for his grounds, and Munch came back four years later to paint that bronze standing among the trees.