About This Artwork

Peter Doig creates dreamlike paintings, influenced by the likes of Edvard Munch and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, that combine a hallucinatory palette with expressive brushwork. Here the image of the two men derives from a photograph taken when the artist was working as a dresser at the London Coliseum. One night, after a production of Igor Stravinsky’s Petrouchka (1911), Doig and a friend donned costumes from the performance and comically posed for a picture. The artist initially used this photograph as the basis for a figure study; he then superimposed the two men on a landscape borrowed from an antique postcard, depicting the vista from an old German tavern, Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre.