Autoportrait

Munch was 18 when he painted this at the beginning of 1882, about a year after enrolling at the Royal School of Drawing in Kristiania, as Oslo was then called. It is the first self-portrait he made, and it follows the school's rules closely. The head is turned in three-quarter profile, the face modelled in light and shadow, the warm browns set against a cooler dark ground. It is small, oil on paper laid on cardboard, roughly 26 by 19 centimetres. Later that same year he and six other young painters took a studio in a building that also held the rooms of Christian Krohg, the leading naturalist painter in Norway, who looked in to correct their work.