Paysage de fjord. Décor de scène pour « Les Revenants » d'Henrik Ibsen

Ibsen died in Kristiania, the city now called Oslo, in May 1906. That November Max Reinhardt staged Ghosts at his new Kammerspiele in Berlin and had Munch design it. The room in the play is fixed by a stage direction. Through the windows lies a gloomy fjord landscape veiled in steady rain, and this canvas is Munch working that sentence out in paint, mountain walls coming down into cold water. He was 43 and had known the plays since he was young. The theatre job grew into a second one, a set of paintings for the foyer upstairs at the Kammerspiele that is still called the Reinhardt Frieze. He did both in a year when he was drinking heavily and moving from one German spa town to the next. The picture is in the Munch Museum in Oslo.