Christian Munch on the Couch

At the end of 1880 the teenage Edvard Munch left the technical college in Kristiania, as Oslo was then called, where he had been training as an engineer, and decided to become a painter. His father Christian, an army doctor, regarded art as an unholy trade. In 1881 the son enrolled at the city's Royal Drawing School, and that same year he painted the man who had disapproved. Here the doctor sits in the corner of the family sofa beside a table, spectacles on, a paper in his hands. The Norwegian title says exactly that, in the corner of the sofa. It is a very small picture, about 21 by 18 centimetres, painted in oil straight onto paper with no priming, and Munch never signed it. The Munch Museum records a second oil of the same scene from that year, on cardboard, and in 1883 he drew his father again, resting after dinner.