Aase Nørregaard

Aase Norregaard trained as a painter at the Royal School of Design in Kristiania and showed city views at the autumn exhibitions there. She had known Munch since the late 1880s, and when she married the lawyer Harald Norregaard in 1889 she changed her first name from Aasta, because a better-known painter already carried the same married name. Munch painted her standing, full length, on nearly two metres of canvas, in 1902, the year he hung the Frieze of Life at the Berlin Secession. She died in 1908, at 39. Writing to her husband afterwards, Munch said he knew what had been lost, because she had been the best of his own women friends.