Autorretrato con pinceles

By 1904 Munch was living on commissions from German collectors, and the year's largest one had just collapsed. Max Linde, an eye doctor in Lübeck, had asked him for a frieze for his sons' nursery, looked at the finished paintings and decided they were not suitable for children. Munch had also painted Linde himself that spring, standing full length in a pale, nearly empty room. When he turned the same arrangement on himself at the end of the year, the pose, the space and the colour carried straight over. This is his first full-length self-portrait and one of only three paintings in which he shows himself holding the tools of the trade. He dated it 1905, though the Munch Museum places it in December 1904.