Donna che piange

Warnemünde was a bathing resort on the German Baltic, and Munch rented a house there in the summer of 1907 to work and to get out of Berlin. In his room at the Hotel Rohn he took a photograph that summer of a professional model, Rosa Meissner, standing naked by the bed, with her sister caught as a blur behind her.

The museum in Oslo connects that photograph to this group of pictures. Munch went back at the pose for the next two years in drawings, in around half a dozen paintings and in a print, and in 1914 he modelled it as a plaster figure, which was cast in bronze long after.

Within a year of painting this he had collapsed in Copenhagen and spent eight months in a clinic there. He drank very little for the rest of his life.