Christian Munch with Pipe

In the spring of 1885 the young Edvard Munch spent three weeks in Paris on a travel grant, his first real look at art beyond Norway. Home again in Kristiania, as Oslo was then called, he went on painting the people nearest to hand, and his father sat for him more than once. Here Christian Munch, then in his late sixties, is seen close up in a dark coat, spectacles on, looking down as he draws on his pipe. The Norwegian title is precise about it, a langpipe, the long-stemmed pipe whose shank runs down to the hand gripping it at the bottom of the canvas. The picture is small, about 37 by 28 centimetres, and Munch never signed it. In 2008 the Munch Museum in Oslo hung it in an exhibition about his early years, from 1880 to 1892.