Self-Portrait

Munch's Self-Portrait of 1886, now in the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, is one of his earliest fully realised self-examinations — a young painter confronting himself in the mirror with the same psychological intensity he brought to his portraits of others. Self-portraiture was central to Munch's practice throughout his long career, the series of self-portraits extending from this 1886 canvas to works made in his final years constituting one of the most sustained and psychologically revealing self-examinations in the history of European art. At twenty-three he was establishing himself in the radical Kristiania bohemian circle while still dependent on academic training and conventional commission work; the self-portrait at this moment captures a painter aware of his exceptional gifts and ambitious to deploy them in ways that conventional Naturalism could not contain. The National Museum's holding of this early self-portrait alongside his later ones enables the tracing of his development across a fifty-year period of sustained self-scrutiny.

Munch's brushwork is restless and sinuous, with flowing lines that animate the entire picture surface — sky, water, and figures unified by the same curving rhythmic energy. His palette is expressively heightened — blood reds, acid greens.