Self-Portrait

On 11 December 1885 a novel called From the Kristiania Bohemia appeared in Kristiania, as Oslo was then called, and the authorities banned it and had the police seize it almost at once. Its author, the writer Hans Jæger, was tried and sent to prison the following year. Jæger's circle, which argued openly for free love and against the city's respectable morals, was Munch's company in these years, and the National Museum describes the young man in this portrait in just those terms, as the arrogant, self-assured bohemian. He was 22. The way the paint is handled matters as much as the look on his face. Munch scratched into the surface and thinned the paint, so the face seems to come up out of a haze, lit from somewhere past the edge of the canvas. He was using the same rough method at the time on The Sick Child. The canvas is small, about 33 centimetres high, and it belonged to Munch's close friend Aase Nørregaard and her husband, the lawyer Harald Nørregaard, before the National Gallery bought it in 1938.