Otto Linthoe

By 1883 Munch was 19 and painting out of a shared studio in the Kristiania building the artists called Pultosten, at Lille Grensen 7, where Christian Krohg, then the leading realist painter in Norway, came by to look over their work. That summer he went out to Modum, west of the city, to the open-air academy Frits Thaulow paid for so young painters could work outdoors in front of the motif. This portrait comes from the same year, painted on cardboard in the sober browns Norwegian portraiture still expected. The sitter is a bearded man in a dark uniform coat with a gold sash across his chest and a small decoration at the throat, and beyond the name on the catalogue card almost nothing about him is recorded. It was in 1883 too that Munch first showed a painting in public, at the Industry and Art Exhibition in Kristiania.