Ingeborg in Green

In September 1913 Munch showed his work at the Konstnärshuset, the artists' house in Stockholm, and a photograph of the hang survives. On this canvas hangs a small label marked sold. He had most likely painted it the year before. The woman standing full length and facing straight out is Ingeborg Kaurin, who kept house for him and posed for him in these years, and the canvas, more than one and a half metres tall, makes her close to life-size. The Museum of Fine Arts points out how calm she looks beside the images of death and anguished desire that made his name around 1900, while the strong colour and broad, loose brushwork are entirely his. By the end of 1913 the picture belonged to Carl Steinbart, a collector in Berlin, and in 1916 it was with the Thannhauser gallery in Munich. It later went back to Norway and was shown in Oslo in 1951 under her first name alone. The museum bought it from an Oslo gallery in 1957.