Stillleben mit Krug, Apfel, Walnuss und Kokosnuss

Munch was 17 when he painted this, on a piece of cardboard about the size of a postcard. He had entered a technical college in Kristiania in 1879 to train as an engineer, left it, and by 1880 was enrolled at the Royal School of Art and Design, where beginners spent their days drawing plaster casts and painting arrangements of household objects set out on a table, exactly like this jar with its apple, walnut and coconut. He was still living in his father's flat. Christian Munch was an army doctor who treated the poor of the eastern districts of the city for very little money. The painting is among the earliest things in the Munch Museum in Oslo, which holds the more than a thousand paintings he left to the city when he died in 1944.