Aase Nørregaard

Norway had no state art academy until 1909, so the woman in this portrait trained where Munch himself had trained, at the Royal School of Design in Kristiania. Aase Nørregaard, born Aasta Carlsen, showed at the national Autumn Exhibition on and off between 1888 and 1902, and her subjects were modern city streets. She had known Munch since the late 1880s and was married to his close friend, the lawyer Harald Nørregaard. The museum dates the picture to about 1899, though 1895 or 1896 has also been argued. The face is worked up firmly while the dress and the background stay thin and hazy, which is how Munch handled his sitters around 1900. When she died in 1908 he wrote to her husband that he had lost the best of his women friends.