The story
Bernt Anker, a timber merchant and shipowner counted the richest man in Norway, rebuilt Frogner Manor in 1791 and 1792 as his summer house and filled it every week with the elite of Christiania, as Oslo was then called. The city bought the estate in 1896, and since 1909 the manor's main building, now inside Frogner Park, has housed the City Museum, Bymuseet. It is the core of Oslo Museum, a foundation formed in 2006 that also runs the Theatre Museum, the Workers' Museum and the Intercultural Museum.
The collections are about Oslo and the people who lived in it, with one of Norway's largest photograph archives and a large group of portraits and views of old Christiania. Among the paintings is an early self-portrait by Edvard Munch, dated 1882 to 1883, made while he was still in his teens and just starting out as a painter in the city.
