Old Man with a Beard

By 1897 Munch was deep in the Frieze of Life, the long series of paintings about love, anxiety and death that would occupy him for years. This quiet study of an unnamed old man sits well to one side of that. He laid the paint thinly on raw, unprimed canvas, so the weave shows through the beard and the dark coat, and nothing is worked up to a polished finish. Munch never signed it. It stayed among the thousands of pieces he kept around him and left to the city of Oslo when he died in 1944.