Garden in Lübeck

Garden in Lübeck was painted during Munch's extended stay in Lübeck in 1903, when he was working on the Linde Frieze commission and socializing with the cultured north German bourgeoisie of the Hanseatic city. Dr. Max Linde's garden, or one of the gardens of Lübeck's patrician families, provided him with the subject: a conventional garden scene rendered in the relatively bright palette and more relaxed manner he adopted for plein-air observation between major works. Lübeck in summer offered Munch a contrast with the Norwegian coastal summer he knew at Åsgårdstrand, and the garden paintings of this period show him engaging with a more ordered, domesticated version of outdoor space than the open Norwegian landscape. The Munch Museum holds this as a document of his German period.

The garden is painted with a brighter, more Impressionist touch than Munch's Norwegian landscapes, the summer foliage rendered in varied greens and the garden's order imposing a more structured compositional framework than his open coastal scenes. The palette is relatively high-keyed and the handling more relaxed.