Marius Selmer

Marius Selmer of 1888 is a portrait of a Norwegian public figure from the professional class, the commission placing Munch within the network of bourgeois patronage that supported his early career alongside the more personally motivated work of his symbolic development. The year 1888 was a significant transitional moment: he had just experienced his first Paris exposure and was absorbing the lessons of Impressionist colour handling while preparing for the more systematic Paris scholarship year of 1889. His bourgeois portraits from 1888 show the influence of this exposure — the palette somewhat brighter, the handling more confident — without yet taking the radical symbolic and Expressionist risks of his 1890s work. Selmer was likely a lawyer, politician, or similar figure whose portrait represented a conventional professional commission; the specific identity gives the canvas a social-historical dimension as documentation of Norwegian professional-class self-presentation at the turn of the century.

The portrait shows Munch's growing confidence in facial modelling, with the warm-cool tonal variation in the flesh areas handled more freely than in the earlier academic works from three years before. The background is treated with greater painterly looseness, suggesting his evolving instinct to subordinate secondary areas to the expressive priority of the face.