Eberhard Grisebach

By 1932 the philosopher Eberhard Grisebach had been Munch's friend for almost a quarter of a century. They met in the summer of 1908 in Warnemünde, a German resort on the Baltic, and in 1931 Grisebach moved from the university in Jena to a chair in Zurich. The following year Munch painted him several times, and the Munch Museum holds four of the results. Here, on a canvas about two metres tall, the sitter stands full length in a rust-brown suit and a hat, one hand on his hip, his face tinged green against a blue ground. The picture was never sold. It is one of the works examined in a 2012 conservation study of water stains, which turn up on about 13 percent of the paintings the artist bequeathed to Oslo and probably came from working outdoors or from poor storage.