Andreas Singdahlsen

In 1883 the painter of this portrait was about 20, an art student in Kristiania, the city now called Oslo, and a full decade before The Scream. Munch had not long enrolled at the Royal School of Art and Design, where the expected manner was a sober, dark-toned realism, and this is one of those early works: a straightforward oil likeness of a man named Andreas Singdahlsen, made before Munch had found the raw colour and unease that would carry his name. The muted, shadowed palette here is the Kristiania studio manner of the early 1880s. Around this time he was falling in with the older naturalist painter Christian Krohg, who pushed him to paint directly from life.