After the turn of the century Edvard Munch’s palette became lighter. Abandoning the symbolic period’s depictions of a state of mind, he began focusing on the external reality. Among his many portraits, there is this one, of a seated old man with folded arms, covered in a coat, sporting a dark hat. He gazes grimly in front of himself or into himself. His face is lined by the march of time, his hair grey at the temples. The dark male figure is outlined against an intense, yellow background and surrounded by a broken blue contour line. The painting’s equilibristic lightness, including rhythmically pendulous brush strokes in heavily diluted paint, is in sharp contrast to the motif’s prosaic simplicity. In the following years, Munch would depict workers and male bathers from a vitalist point of view. (Vitalism was a movement that advocated bracing outdoor activities and bathing in the nude.) The painting was purchased by an unknown buyer at Munch’s 1912 exhibition in Gothenburg and later ended up in Gustaf Werner’s collection.
