Aasta Carlsen

Munch was 24 when he painted this, still a Kristiania painter with no reputation outside Norway. His first one-man show in the city came the next year, in 1889, along with the state scholarship that sent him to Paris. The sitter was Aasta Carlsen, 19 and a painter herself. In 1889 she married the lawyer Harald Norregaard and changed her first name to Aase, which is why she turns up in Norwegian collections under two names. She stayed one of Munch's closest friends until her death in 1908, at 39. He painted her again after the marriage, once alone and once beside her husband, and both of those canvases are in Oslo's National Museum.