Self-Portrait against Two-Coloured Background

By 1904 Munch's career had moved to Germany. He spent much of that year there, selling to German collectors, and he finished a frieze for the children's room of Max Linde, an eye doctor in Lubeck who had become his most reliable buyer. Linde refused it. The motifs were too charged for a nursery and the colours fought the room's French furniture, and the rejection cost Munch both money and his footing with that patron. He was painting flat in those months, thinking in terms of decorated walls rather than framed pictures, and this self-portrait carries the same handling. The background is two plain fields of colour, green and yellow, and the face is built from a few broad strokes.