Зимний пейзаж, Тюрингия

Munch spent much of 1906 in Thuringia in central Germany, moving between Weimar and the small spa towns where he was taking cures for his nerves and his drinking. The job that kept him there was a portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche, who had died in 1900 and whom Munch had never met. The Swedish banker Ernest Thiel had commissioned it, and Munch worked from photographs and from the house in Weimar where the philosopher's sister kept his archive.

Between sittings that could not happen, he painted the snow. This canvas is signed and dated 1906 and it is about as far from the Nietzsche portrait as he could get, a low horizon, a few trees, flat cold light.

It went north to Bergen, which holds one of the largest groups of Munch paintings outside Oslo.