Young People on the Beach (The Linde Frieze)

Max Linde was an eye doctor in Lubeck and Munch's most useful patron. He bought his work, published a book about him in 1902 called Edvard Munch and the Art of the Future, and in 1903 had him paint his four sons. In 1904 he commissioned a frieze of pictures for the boys' nursery. Munch went back to the beach at Asgardstrand on the Oslo fjord, the shoreline he had already used for his Frieze of Life, and painted the same summer-night figures by the water. Linde could see where it was going. On 8 August 1904 he wrote asking that the motifs suit a child's nature, so please avoid lovers or people kissing. The canvases went to Lubeck and came back. Linde bought a quieter painting instead to make up the money, and the rejected frieze stayed with Munch, who left everything in his studio to the city of Oslo when he died in 1944.