Sailors in Port

The Munch Museum dates this canvas to 1903 and records it as unsigned, one of the many paintings Munch kept and left to the city of Oslo. In 1903 he was spending long stretches in Germany, and bars, dance halls and brothels were a subject he kept coming back to. In the same period he began Christmas in the Brothel, which grew out of a visit to a brothel in Lübeck. The museum's catalogue places this picture next to a Merry Company from the same year and a Brothel Scene from a few years earlier. Women in red, yellow and green dresses stand along the left, the sailors of the title make a dark block of caps and coats on the right, and in the foreground one woman, seen from behind, faces them across an empty pink floor.