Landscape by Travemünde

Landscape by Travemünde belongs to the group of works Munch made during his extended German stay of 1903, when Travemünde's flat Baltic coastal landscape gave him material very different from his Norwegian coastal subjects. The Baltic at Travemünde had a distinctive character — shallow, calm, and dominated by the wide sky above the flat land — that required Munch to adapt his landscape vocabulary to less dramatic topographic material than the Norwegian fjords and coastline provided. The Munch Museum holds this alongside other works from his German period, preserving the Baltic landscapes as a distinct strand in his output of these years.

Munch's Baltic landscape composition emphasizes the horizontal to a degree unusual even for a painter consistently drawn to flat, horizon-dominated formats. The sky and sea are given equal weight in a composition structured around the subtle color difference between Baltic water and northern sky.