Women and Children in Warnemünde

In May 1907 Munch came to Warnemünde, a small resort on Germany's Baltic coast near Rostock, hoping that sea air and steady work would pull him out of a long personal crisis. He rented rooms from a harbour pilot in an old fisherman's house on the Alter Strom, the canal that runs through the town to the sea, and he painted the people and streets around him. This canvas is from that first year. Women in long dark dresses stand talking, babies in their arms and small children at their skirts, while a little dog crosses the foreground and a tree trunk runs down the left edge, with the water and a row of houses behind. It is nearly a metre tall, laid in with quick, open strokes. From Warnemünde he wrote to the Swedish collector Ernest Thiel that fresh air and good finances had done great things for him.