Old Man in Warnemünde

In the yard behind the fisherman's cottage at Am Strom 53 in Warnemünde, where Munch lodged from 1907, stood an old pear tree. It grows right beside the stooped old man, its trunk running up the centre of the canvas, with a white wall and red window frames behind. The association that now runs the house describes the painting as a memorial to two old residents at once, the pear and the painter's landlord, a harbour pilot. The tree turned out to be at least 220 years old. A storm badly damaged it in September 2019, and in November 2024 it was cut down, leaving the lower trunk standing. Two shoots taken from it had already been planted outside the new MUNCH museum in Oslo in 2021. In a 2017 study, researchers scanned this canvas with a hyperspectral camera and found artificial ultramarine in the blues and cadmium green in the leaves.