Autoportrait

In the autumn of 1882 Munch was 18 and had given up an engineering course two years earlier, to his father's disappointment. That autumn he and six other young artists rented a shared studio in the middle of Christiania, the city now called Oslo, and the painter Christian Krohg, an established name there, would come by to correct their work. This small portrait of himself on a panel, about 44 centimetres tall, comes from those months or the ones just after. It is among the earliest pictures of the face he would go on painting for the next 60 years. The panel belongs to the Oslo Museum, in the collection that records the history of the city itself, kept at Frogner Manor.