Summer in the Park (The Linde Frieze)

Summer in the Park (The Linde Frieze) was the second of the four panels Munch made for Dr. Max Linde's mansion in Lübeck in 1904, depicting a garden or park scene that complemented the beach setting of the Dance on the Beach panel. The park scene gave Munch an opportunity to explore the specific quality of a German bourgeois garden — ordered, green, and dotted with leisure figures — and to contrast it with the wilder Norwegian coastal setting of the beach panel. Together, the Linde Frieze panels form one of Munch's most ambitious decorative projects and demonstrate his ability to work within a commissioning context without sacrificing his own pictorial vision. The Munch Museum holds all four panels.

Munch uses a warm, leafy green palette for the park scene, with the figures placed among trees and paths in a manner that creates a gently rhythmic decorative surface appropriate to the frieze format. The handling is broad and simplified, designed to read as part of a unified interior decoration rather than as an independent easel painting.