Man with Straw Hat

The straw hat was one of the defining accessories of European bourgeois summer leisure at the turn of the century, appearing in paintings from Renoir to Klimt as a sign of outdoor ease and warm-weather sociability. Munch's male figure in summer dress from 1902 places this informal subject firmly within the Åsgårdstrand summer world — the community of artists, intellectuals, and middle-class Norwegians who gathered on the Oslofjord coast during the summer months. Where his formal portrait commissions required a register of official gravity, his informal figure studies of friends and acquaintances in summer dress had a different quality of attention: more casual, more immediately observed, less concerned with establishing social standing. The straw hat also distances the sitter from the more charged psychological territory of Munch's symbolic figure works, placing him instead in the ordinary social world of summer afternoons and outdoor conversations. The Munch Museum holds this as part of its collection of informal figure studies from the Åsgårdstrand years.

Munch paints the Man with Straw Hat with a relatively relaxed, plein-air quality — the summer light rendered in warm tones, the straw hat itself treated with the textural looseness appropriate to its woven surface, the overall impression one of direct, uncomplicated observation rather than Symbolist intensity.