Man and Woman on the Beach

In 1907 Munch was living in Germany, working in Berlin and then spending the summer in the Baltic resort of Warnemünde, and he was painting a Norwegian shore from a distance. The curving beach and the column of moonlight on the water are the motifs of Åsgårdstrand, the small fjord town where he had spent many summers, and in 2010 this canvas was shown in an exhibition about Munch and that beach. The Munch Museum links it to a picture from three years earlier, Young People on the Beach, one panel of a frieze ordered by the Lübeck eye doctor Max Linde for his children's room. Linde turned the frieze down, finding its lovers unsuitable for children, and the paintings went back to Munch. Here the couple is pulled right up to the front edge, a man in a dark coat in the foreground and a woman in a wide yellow hat leaning in just behind him.