Hermann Schlittgen

In 1904 Munch was living out of suitcases in Germany and at last making money there. That year he signed with the Berlin dealer Bruno Cassirer for his prints and with Commeter in Hamburg for his paintings, and the Berlin Secession took him in as a member. Life-size standing portraits were part of the new business. He had painted Dr Max Linde's four sons in Lubeck the year before. Hermann Schlittgen came from an older part of his life, a German draughtsman who had spent years supplying comic drawings to the Munich magazines, and Munch had known him since at least 1893, when he wrote of sitting with a Munich painter named Schlittgen. Munch called the canvas The German. It stands two metres tall, and it is in Oslo because he never sold it.