The story
For years an unfinished portrait of a woman with a violin hung on the dining-room wall of the college president's house at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. It had arrived with the bequest of Richard Tetlie, a 1943 graduate and collector who left the college more than 2,000 works after his death in 1999. The sitter is thought to be Eva Mudocci, a violinist the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch knew in the early 1900s. In 2019, tests of its pigments and binders found them consistent with Munch's materials, enough for the college to call it very likely his.
The painting belongs to the collection of the Flaten Art Museum, the college's teaching museum in the Dittmann Center, named for Arnold Flaten and his family. Its more than 4,000 objects run from prints and photographs to ceramics and textiles. Two small landscapes by a teenage Munch are here as well, Autumn in the Forest from 1880 and From Sandvika, painted a year later in a town just west of Oslo.
