Daniel Jacobson

Munch painted this while he was a patient. In the autumn of 1908 he collapsed in Copenhagen and admitted himself to a private nerve clinic run by Daniel Jacobson, a Danish doctor who treated him with rest, diet and electrotherapy and who let him carry on working. He stayed about eight months.

So the sitter is his own physician, painted on the doctor's own ward, and painted large. The canvas is over two metres tall and Jacobson fills it standing, hands on his hips, in hard reds and blues. Word reached Munch in that clinic that Norway had made him a knight of the Order of St Olav and that the national gallery in Kristiania, as Oslo was then called, was buying his work. He left in the spring of 1909 and went home to Norway for good.