Jakob Bratland

The man in this portrait was a painter too. Jacob Bratland was born in Bergen in 1859, trained at the Munich academy under Ludwig von Loefftz and then in Paris, and came home with a silver medal from the Paris World's Fair of 1889. A success at the Autumn Exhibition in Kristiania, as Oslo was then called, brought him from Bergen to the capital in 1891, and that is about when Munch painted him. Bratland went on making careful, anecdotal scenes of Norwegian country life while Munch was heading somewhere else entirely. By the middle of the 1890s he was painting less and doubting himself more, and he died suddenly in Kristiania in 1906, at 47.