Potted Plant on the Window-Sill

Munch was 17 when he painted this. In 1880 he had walked out of the technical college in Kristiania where he was training as an engineer, writing in his diary that he had decided to become a painter, and in 1881 he enrolled at the Royal School of Drawing in the same city. His first oils are domestic and small, made inside the flat his family rented, and this is one of them, a plant in a pot on a window sill. His father was a military doctor with little money and strong religious convictions, and the rooms these pictures were painted in were not large. The Scream came 12 years later. The Munch Museum in Oslo, which holds the enormous body of work he left to the city at his death in 1944, dates this to 1881 and 1882, among the earliest paintings by him that survive.