Old Fisherman and his Daughter

Old Fisherman and his Daughter from 1902 depicts a subject from the Norwegian coastal working class — an elderly fisherman and his grown daughter in a domestic or outdoor setting — that reflects Munch's ongoing interest in the lives of working people in the Åsgårdstrand community he inhabited each summer. Unlike his bourgeois sitters, the fisherman and his daughter were observed figures from the Norwegian coastal working class rather than commissioning patrons, and Munch's treatment carries the weight of observation without the complications of social obligation. The Städel Museum in Frankfurt holds this as one of its few Munch acquisitions, an unusual institutional home for a Norwegian figure composition.

Munch renders the two figures with the directness appropriate to observed working-class subjects — no glamorizing of pose or setting, the figures given the worn dignity of people whose faces show the outdoor life they have led. The composition is relatively simple, the two figures placed in a limited space without elaborate background.