From Travemünde

Travemünde, the seaside resort where the Trave River meets the Baltic Sea north of Lübeck, became familiar to Munch during his extended stays in the Lübeck region while working for Dr. Max Linde. Linde had first seen Munch's work at an 1902 Berlin exhibition and immediately commissioned both a portrait of his four sons (now in the Hamburg Kunsthalle) and the decorative Linde Frieze. Travemünde offered Munch a Baltic seaside landscape very different from his Norwegian coastal subjects: flatter, less dramatic in its geology, with a different character of light over the shallow Baltic compared to the deep Oslofjord. The Museum Behnhaus Drägerhaus in Lübeck, a civic museum focused on the art and history of the Hanseatic city, holds this as a local record of the Norwegian painter's sustained presence in the region — one of the most important instances of Munch's direct engagement with the German landscape during the years of his greatest international recognition.

Munch's Travemünde view applies his broadly Expressionist landscape method to the flat Baltic coastal landscape, which lacks the dramatic topographic character of his Norwegian scenes. The horizontal emphasis of the Baltic coast — low beach, wide sea, big sky — is reflected in the compositional structure and the handling.