Henrik Ibsen im Grand Café

In 1898 Henrik Ibsen turned 70 and Norway gave him a national jubilee, with banquets in Kristiania, Copenhagen and Stockholm and a collected edition of the plays beginning to appear. The routine behind the celebrity was rigid. Ibsen walked down Karl Johan street to the Grand Café at the same hour every day, took the same table, read the papers, and people in the city said they set their watches by him. Munch was 35 years younger, knew him, and had made the programme design for the Paris production of Peer Gynt two years earlier. He painted the old man sitting there among the other customers. He came back to the subject in a lithograph in 1902, by which time Ibsen had suffered the strokes that ended his writing.