Landowner in the Park

In 1903 Munch was living an unsettled life between Germany and Norway, and that year he gained the patron who would steady his career: Dr. Max Linde, a Lübeck eye doctor with one of the most important private collections in Europe, who took the still little-known Norwegian into his family. That calm was recent. Only months earlier, in the autumn of 1902, a violent quarrel with his lover Tulla Larsen had ended with a revolver going off and Munch losing part of a finger. This portrait of a landowner in his park belongs to that German chapter, when garden and park scenes were exactly the kind of work Munch was making for his new circle. The following year he would paint a whole frieze of such park scenes for the Linde house.