Old Age

In 1907 and 1908 Munch was living on the Baltic coast at Warnemuende, a German seaside resort, and much of what he painted there came straight off the beach. This picture belongs to a large three-part work he built in those years around the ages of man, with naked figures standing in hard open sunlight. The subject was very much of its moment. Across Germany and Scandinavia a health movement was pushing people out of the smoky cities to sunbathe, swim and live closer to nature, and Munch, after years of poor health, threw himself into that open-air life on the shore. The body here is set down in broad, blunt strokes and strong colour, less a portrait of any one man than of sun, salt water and the wear of a long life on the skin.