Halvard Stub Holmboe

In the autumn of 1886 Munch showed The Sick Child at the annual exhibition in Kristiania, and the reviewers treated it as barely a painting at all, unfinished, thrown down, a joke at the public's expense. He was 22. He carried on working mostly from the people nearest to him, friends of his own generation rather than paying sitters. The man here is Halvard Stub Holmboe, born in 1864 and later a merchant, shown sitting indoors with a book. Two years after this, in 1889, Munch had his first one-man show in Kristiania and won a state travel grant that took him to Paris. The museums in Bergen, which hold the third largest collection of his work anywhere, have his portrait of Marie Helene Holmboe as well.