Intérieur avec peintre

Kirchner had been in the Swiss mountains since 1917, sent there after the war broke him. He joined an artillery regiment in 1915, was discharged within months, and spent the following years in sanatoria with a morphine habit. From 1918 he lived in a farmhouse at Frauenkirch below Davos, and this is that room, with the painter in profile holding a brush and Erna Schilling, his companion, bent over coloured work in her lap. The heavy bed along the wall was his own carpentry, its posts cut with figures, a horse among them. In January 1922 the Frankfurt dealer Ludwig Schames hung the picture in a show of the new paintings and prints Kirchner had made in Switzerland since 1916.