Self-Portrait

The Munch Museum in Oslo dates this canvas 1888 with a question mark, and it is unsigned. The painter was about 24 then, working in Kristiania, as Oslo was called at the time. He shows himself standing in a dark suit and white collar, hands out of sight. The light falls from one side and cuts across the face, so one eye is sharp and wide open while the other sinks into shadow. Much of the paint has flaked away, and bare canvas shows through in the background and down the coat.

In 2008 the picture hung in the museum's exhibition Munch Becoming Munch, about his artistic strategies up to 1892. In 2017 the novelist Karl Ove Knausgård chose it for his own show there, which brought many works up from storage for the first time.