Portrait of an Old Man

In June 1907 the local paper in Warnemünde noted that a Norwegian painter had arrived in the Baltic resort. Munch was coming out of years of hotels, drinking and bad nerves. After a short stay at Hosmanns Hotel he rented rooms in a fisherman's house at Am Strom 53 from a harbour pilot called Carl Nielsen, and he stayed 18 months, writing that fresh air and steady money had done him a great deal of good.

The Munch Museum records the sitter of this small canvas as Carl Nielsen, so the old man is his landlord. That calm did not hold. In October 1908 Munch left Warnemünde abruptly, called it a terribly bourgeois place, and put himself into a nerve clinic in Copenhagen for eight months.

The canvas is 51.5 by 46 centimetres, signed in the lower right corner, and the museum files it beside the larger Old Man in Warnemünde from the same year.