Park Landscape

By 1906 Munch was spending long stretches in Germany, and he passed much of that year in Bad Kösen, a small spa town in Thüringen, where he had gone to quiet his nerves. He was drinking heavily and easily unsettled in those years, and a park like this was the kind of calm a spa town was meant to supply. In the same months he was traveling to Berlin to draw stage designs for a production of Ibsen's play Ghosts. This ordinary park sits in a genuinely unsettled stretch of his life. His real breakdown was still two years off, in 1908, when he checked into a Copenhagen clinic and stayed there for about eight months.