Munch understood the value of reaching out to a wide audience with his artistic message and began with printmaking in the autumn of 1894 in Berlin. His very first lithographs and etchings repeated motifs he had previously executed as paintings, but he immediately became enthusiastic about the possibilities of the various graphic techniques Munch regarded printmaking as an independent artistic medium and was self-taught as a graphic artist. He acquired knowledge on the medium and process from the professional printers he used in Berlin. In the lithography The Woman (1899) we recognize parts of a range of motifs Munch used in his paintings