Landowner in the Park

From 1902 Munch was a regular guest in Lübeck, at the villa of Max Linde, an eye doctor who had become his first important German patron. That year Munch made a portfolio of prints for him showing the house, the family and the garden. The Munch Museum links this canvas to one of those prints, a lithograph of the garden front of Linde's house, and dates the painting broadly, between 1902 and 1904. A man in a dark suit is set squarely in front of a white villa, with curving paths and round flowerbeds spread out behind him. The title calls him only a landowner, and the museum's catalogue names no sitter. Munch painted the same motif once more on a smaller piece of unprimed cardboard, dated 1903 and kept in the same collection in Oslo.