Andreas Bjølstad

Munch painted this in 1888, at 24, still a young naturalist in Kristiania and five years away from The Scream. The old man is Andreas Bjolstad, his grandfather on his mother's side. That branch of the family had largely raised him. After his mother died of tuberculosis when he was a boy, it was his aunt Karen Bjolstad who held the household together, and the elderly Andreas belonged to the same close family circle. There is little here of the feverish Munch to come, just a careful, sober look at an aging relative he had known all his life. The same year he set down this portrait, he also drew the old man on his deathbed.