Jonas Lie mit seiner Familie

The old man in this group is Jonas Lie, a novelist counted in Norway beside Ibsen among the four great writers of the century then just ended. He had left the country after going bankrupt as a small-town lawyer in the late 1860s, and he spent more than 30 years abroad, most of them in Paris, writing Norway from a distance. Munch painted him with his family in 1902, when Lie was in his late sixties and both men belonged to the loose Scandinavian circle that shifted between Paris, Berlin and the Norwegian coast. Lie went home for good in 1906 and died two years later. The painting came to Oslo with the enormous body of work Munch left the city on his death in 1944.