Joven lavándose

Munch spent 1896 in Paris, learning colour lithography in Auguste Clot's printing workshop and designing the programme for Ibsen's Peer Gynt at Lugne-Poe's Theatre de l'Oeuvre. The washstand was a Paris subject by then. Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and Bonnard had all been painting women at their basins, in rooms nobody was supposed to be looking into, and this is Munch trying that ordinary, unliterary kind of nude. He painted it on a wood panel and kept the paint so thin that the grain shows through across much of the surface. The collector Olaf Schou handed it to the National Gallery in Kristiania in 1909, as part of the large group of pictures he gave the museum.