From Travemünde

From Travemünde depicts the Baltic Sea resort town near Lübeck where Munch spent time during his extended German stay of 1903, when he was working on the Linde Frieze and socializing with Dr. Max Linde's circle. Travemünde was a traditional north German seaside resort with a particular combination of Baltic beach, lighthouse, and fishing harbor that gave Munch material quite different from his Norwegian coastal subjects. The Museum Behnhaus Drägerhaus in Lübeck — a city museum dedicated to the art and cultural history of the Hanseatic city — holds this as a local record of Munch's important stay in the region.

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.