Trees by the Beach (The Linde Frieze)

In 1904 the Lübeck eye doctor Max Linde, one of Munch's earliest steady patrons, asked him for a frieze to hang in his children's nursery. Munch answered with the shore he knew best, the beach at Åsgårdstrand on the Oslo fjord where he spent his summers, but he filled it with the couples, embraces and solitary figures of his grown-up world. Linde refused the set on sight. The colours fought the room's pale French furniture, and the subjects, he felt, were no matter for a child. This panel is one of the calmer pieces, heavy trees leaning out over the water, their trunks crowding a thin strip of sand. Munch kept everything, and it hangs now in the Oslo museum built from what stayed in his studio.