Self-Portrait in Broad Brimmed Hat

Munch painted this around 1905, the year Norway finally dissolved its union with Sweden and became a country on its own. He himself was mostly abroad, moving between German towns, exhibiting and drinking hard, a few years after the quarrel with his lover Tulla Larsen ended with a pistol going off and cost him part of a finger on his left hand. Self-portraits were his running record through all of it. He made them the way other people keep a diary, checking his own face for what had changed. Here he wears the broad-brimmed hat of the studio bohemian, the costume of the artist as a public figure. He would go on painting himself for another 39 years, and the breakdown that put him in a Copenhagen clinic was still three years off.