Village Square in Elgersburg, Thuringia

Munch spent most of 1905 to 1907 in Germany, moving between spa towns and clinics, drinking hard and trying to get his nerves back. Elgersburg, a small place in the Thuringian hills with a sanatorium, was one of those stops, and he painted the village square there in the winter of 1906. It was not a quiet year. A few hours away in Weimar he was working on a portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche, who had died in 1900 and whom he had never met, ordered by the Swedish banker Ernest Thiel. In Berlin that autumn Max Reinhardt staged Ibsen's Ghosts with sets Munch had designed. The Elgersburg picture went into an exhibition of the Berlin Secession, the society of artists who had broken away from the official Berlin salon.