Olga and Rosa Meissner

Munch spent the summer of 1907 at Warnemünde, a bathing resort on the German Baltic coast, in a small house by the water. He had been drinking hard and living out of hotels for years. The autumn after this, in 1908, he collapsed in Copenhagen and spent about eight months in a nerve clinic.

These two were sisters, Rosa and Olga Meissner, models he had worked with in Berlin and brought north to pose for him on the coast. The same trip produced a set of photographs of Munch himself standing on the sand with Rosa, taken with his own camera. In one of them Olga is thought to have been the person holding it.

That resort also had a nudist beach at the far end, and it gave him his bathing men that summer, painted the size of life.