Red-Haired Girl with White Rat

Munch signed this small canvas Edv. Munch 86 in the lower corner, and 1886 was the year that made him notorious at home. That autumn he showed The Sick Child in Kristiania, the old name for Oslo, and its scraped, unfinished surface drew open ridicule from Norwegian critics. This quiet little portrait comes from the same hand and the same year, a young girl with red hair holding a white rat against a dim ground. He was 22, still working his way out of the careful realism he had been taught. The paint is thin and the colours kept low, so the pale animal and the child's hair are almost the only bright notes. Nothing here announces the painter who would later unsettle Berlin. It is a plain study of a child and her pet, made in the months he was learning to leave a surface rough on purpose.