Caricature Portrait of Henrik Lund

1905 was the year Norway voted itself out of its union with Sweden. Munch spent that summer at Asgardstrand on the fjord, where he ended up in a drunken fistfight with the younger painter Ludvig Karsten, and then left the country for German clinics and spa towns and stayed away until 1909. Henrik Lund, the man in this picture, was a Norwegian painter 16 years younger than him who had taken up his manner early and was in Paris that year. Munch called the portrait a caricature. He used the same word for a portrait he made of Tulla Larsen, the woman whose quarrel with him three years earlier had ended with a pistol going off and Munch losing part of a finger. Both pictures are in the Munch Museum in Oslo.