Andreas à la fenêtre

Munch was 19 when he painted this, and 1883 was the year he first showed work in public, at an industry and art exhibition in Kristiania, as Oslo was then called. He was learning under Christian Krohg, the leading Norwegian realist of the day, and painting what was to hand, which meant his family. The sitter is his younger brother Peter Andreas, at the window in ordinary daylight, the kind of quiet interior a student was expected to produce. Andreas was the only one of the five Munch children to marry. He trained as a doctor, took a post as a ship's physician, and died in 1895, a few months after his wedding.