Marta Sandal

Marta Sandal by Edvard Munch from 1902 depicts an identified sitter — Marta Sandal — who moves in the orbit of Munch's Norwegian and German social world of the early 1900s. Munch painted a considerable number of portraits of women in his circle — some commissioned, some made as gifts or out of personal interest — and Marta Sandal likely belongs to the Norwegian artistic and bourgeois milieu that Munch inhabited during the summer months at Åsgårdstrand or in Kristiania. The preserved name gives the work a documentary specificity: this is a real woman from Munch's life, painted with his characteristic directness.

Munch renders his female sitter with the psychological engagement he brought to his closest portrait subjects — the face studied with care, the posture captured with directness, the background treated broadly so that the figure's presence dominates. His palette for a 1902 portrait would use his characteristic warm flesh tones against a more neutral or contrasting background color.