Helge Bäckström

Munch was 29 and notorious in Berlin. The city's artists' association had invited him to exhibit in November 1892, then voted to close the show after a week, which put his name in newspapers across Germany. He stayed on, drinking at the wine bar his circle called Zum schwarzen Ferkel with Strindberg and the Polish writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski, and painting the canvases that became the Frieze of Life. The Scream is from the same year as this portrait, 1893. Helge Backstrom was a Swedish mineralogist who had been lecturing on rocks and microscopes at Stockholm since 1891. In November 1893 he married Ragnhild Juell, whose sister Dagny had come to Berlin with Munch and sat at the centre of that circle. Munch painted the wife as well, the following January. The Stockholm banker Ernest Thiel bought this one, and it still hangs in the house he built for his collection.