Karl Dørnberger

In the spring of 1889 Munch held his first one-man exhibition in Kristiania, the old name for Oslo, and that autumn a state scholarship sent him to Paris. This portrait belongs to the months in between. Karl Dørnberger was a painter as well, the elegant one among Munch's friends, the son of a German-born master brewer. The regard ran both ways on paper: Dørnberger drew Munch in pencil while Munch was getting over an illness in his house, and that sheet is in Oslo. The painted half of the exchange left Norway and is in Leipzig. Dørnberger himself spent most of his life in Tønsberg, the coastal town south of the capital where his father had the brewery, a place he once called the lovely, terrible rubbish town.