Moonlight on the Beach

By 1904 Munch's living came almost entirely out of Germany. He joined the Berlin Secession that year, the publisher Bruno Cassirer took on his prints, and German collectors were buying the paintings. He still spent his summers on the Oslo fjord at Asgardstrand, a small shore town of white fences and smooth rocks, and the motif here comes from that stretch of coast. The vertical pillar of moonlight on the water had been in his pictures since the early 1890s, always the same shape, and he used it as a piece of the composition rather than as an effect of weather. He had bought a small wooden house in Asgardstrand in 1898 and he kept it for the rest of his life.