Femme qui pleure

In the summer of 1907 Munch was staying at Warnemünde, a Baltic bathing resort in Germany, and there he photographed a professional model, Rosa Meissner, standing undressed in her room at the Hotel Rohn. He went back to that image for the next two years, making the figure again in oil, in print and in bronze, which was unusual for him, and taking away more of the hotel room each time. This canvas comes at the end of that run, in 1909. The museum in Münster that owns it calls the picture The Weeping Girl. The photograph survives as well, in the Munch Museum in Oslo, among the pictures he took with the small hand camera he had been carrying since 1902.