Study of a Head

In 1883, in Kristiania, the city we now call Oslo, the painter was only 19, and this small head study was the first work he ever got into a public show. It hung at the Norwegian Industry and Art Exhibition, next to established names like Frits Thaulow and Eilif Peterssen. A reviewer for the Dagbladet newspaper singled out the handling of the skin, though he found the red-haired young woman more striking than pretty. Who she was, nobody recorded. The picture belongs to a run of about 20 small portrait studies the young Munch painted between 1882 and 1885, working through how a face sits in light. The anguished pictures that would make his name were still ten years off. The National Gallery in Oslo bought this early study in 1964.