Spring in Dr. Linde's Garden

Spring in Dr. Linde's Garden was painted in 1903 during Munch's stay in Lübeck for the frieze commission, depicting the collector's garden in the season that preceded the summer subjects of the frieze panels themselves. Dr. Max Linde's garden was a cultured north German bourgeois garden — orderly, planted with care, and combining the formal elements of German garden design with the informality of a lived personal space. By painting it in spring, Munch captured the garden in a state of emergence and promise rather than full summer display, the quality of early-season light and nascent growth given a distinctly Munch-like quality of poised anticipation. The work's current location is untraced, likely in private ownership.

Munch renders the spring garden in a relatively bright palette — the pale greens of emerging foliage, the soft tones of spring sky, the bare earth where plants are beginning to establish — that reflects the season's particular quality of tender, provisional color before summer's full development.