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In November 1892 Munch was invited to Berlin to show 55 paintings at the city's artists' association. Its members voted a week later to take the show down, and the row made his name in Germany. This wood was painted the same year, at home in Norway, before any of that happened. A bank of pine trunks like these worked for him as a kind of stage set, and the catalogue of his paintings links this canvas to Ashes of 1894, where a man and a woman stand at the edge of just such a wood. It hangs in Bergen because of Rolf Stenersen, a stockbroker who knew Munch, bought his pictures while they were still cheap, and gave two large collections away to Norwegian cities.