Helge Rode

By 1908 Munch was living in Copenhagen and coming apart. Years of hard drinking, exhaustion and paranoia had caught up with him, and that autumn he checked himself into the nerve clinic of Dr Daniel Jacobson, where he would stay about eight months and, by his own account, put his life back together. This portrait of the Danish poet and playwright Helge Rode belongs to those Copenhagen years. The two men had long moved in the same Scandinavian literary circles. Munch owned a copy of Rode's 1898 play whose title, The Dance Goes On, chimes with his own earlier painting The Dance of Life. Rode is set down quickly, in loose, nervous strokes, the face carried by a few sure marks rather than careful finish, which is how Munch painted the people around him in these years. The canvas is now in the Munch Museum in Oslo, among the works the artist kept himself and left to the city when he died.