Portrait of Elsa Glaser

Around 1913 Edvard Munch, past the breakdown and clinic stay that had interrupted his forties, was settled back in Norway and painting the people who had stood by him. Elsa Glaser was one of them. Her husband, the Berlin art historian Curt Glaser, was among the earliest serious collectors of Munch's work and a loyal friend, and Munch made several portraits within their circle. He painted Elsa standing full length, signed and dated at the upper right. The picture later passed to the Kunsthaus in Zürich, which bought it in 1940, a few years after the Glasers, who were Jewish, had been driven out of Nazi Germany.