Weeping Woman

Munch spent the summer of 1907 at Warnemuende, a bathing resort on the German Baltic coast, having just finished a set of paintings for Max Reinhardt's chamber theatre in Berlin. He was drinking hard. A year later his nerves gave out and he spent eight months in a Copenhagen clinic under a doctor's care. In a hotel room that summer he photographed a professional model, Rosa Meissner, standing with her hands over her face. Munch carried a small Kodak and used it much as other painters used a sketchbook, and that photograph is where this figure begins. He kept returning to the pose over the following years in drawings, in about six paintings and in a print, and in 1914 he modelled it in plaster.