Woman in Blue against Blue Water

In 1929 the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne took this canvas into its collection, under the German title Frau am Meer, Woman by the Sea. Munch was still alive and working in Norway. The picture did not stay long. It left the Cologne collection in November 1938, a year after Nazi officials had stripped the same museum of the modern art they called degenerate, work by Munch among it. Today it is in private hands. The painting itself goes back to 1891, early in his career. A young woman in a long blue dress and a red hat stands with her hands clasped in front of a wide stretch of blue water, and Munch signed and dated it in the lower left corner.