What’s On Display At The National Portrait Gallery’s Munch Exhibition?

Where better than London’s National Portrait Gallery to present the UK’s very first exhibition celebrating Edvard Munch as a portrait artist? Best known for his 1893 work The Scream, this Norwegian painter is famed for his evocative and fluid swoops of colour, making Edvard Munch Portraits the perfect exhibition for anyone who loved sister venue The National Gallery’s spectacular Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers exhibition last autumn. Here’s what to expect.

Hans Jaeger (1889) at Edvard Munch: Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. (© David Parry/National Portrait Gallery)

Edvard Munch Portraits At The National Portrait Gallery: What To Expect

Edvard Munch’s most famous painting is undoubtedly The Scream (1893), which has evolved into one of the world’s most iconic and recognisable artworks. (It’s the only painting on the emoji keyboard, in fact.) Bound up in the sweeping blue of the fjord, the oranges of the sky and the agonised face of the central figure are years of anxiety and torment, existential dread in the face of illness and bereavement. Munch was walking along a path with two friends in Ekeberg, now a sculpture park, with the spot in particular today immortalised with an empty frame which asks visitors to step inside and scream for themselves (an interactive installation masterminded by Marina Abramović). At the foot of the hill Munch was treading, his manic depressive sister Laura Catherine was a patient at a mental asylum. He looked out over the city and the Oslofjord from high up, and ‘sensed an infinite scream passing through nature’. Was it a panic attack? Or just a moment of intense emotion?

That cityscape today is transformed, with the harbour hosting a 13-floor museum dedicated to Munch’s work, including three iterations of The Scream displayed on rotation to protect them from light damage. The fourth and most famous iteration is a little hop across town at The National Museum.

While none of the four delicate versions of The Scream have made it to the National Portrait Gallery’s Edvard Munch Portraits exhibition, plenty of other work is, drawing on loans from Oslo’s Munchmuseet, Nasjonalmuseet and Oslo Museum along with venues across Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands to position Munch, widely considered to be isolated from the mainstream, in conversation with his peers across Scandinavia and Northern Europe, from influential anarchist Hans Jæger to French artist Paul Gauguin, Swedish dramatist August Strindberg to history’s most famous post-Impressionist, Vincent van Gogh. Curated by Alison Smith, this includes works never before seen in the UK, like Munch’s portraits of lawyer Thor Lütken and physicist Felix Auerbach.

According to Smith, the portraiture of Bohemian Munch, whether commissioned or painted for fun, always doubles as an archetype of the human condition. ‘Throughout his life, Munch sought to delve behind the masks of those he portrayed, using expressive paintwork to reveal inner feelings and motivations,’ Smith says. ‘This exhibition provides a unique opportunity to appreciate his work as a portraitist both in terms of his personal relationship with his sitters and with how he portrayed them.’

‘We’re excited to present this exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery to shine a new light on Munch’s deep social connections, and bring together portraits which have never been seen in the UK,’ says Rosie Broadley, the National Portrait Gallery’s joint head of curatorial. ‘I’d like to thank Alison Smith and colleagues at the Gallery for their hard work on this show, key lenders for their collaboration and our supporters AKO Foundation, Viking and the Asbjorn Lunde Foundation.’

Tete-a-tete at Edvard Munch: Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. (© David Parry/National Portrait Gallery)

What’s On Display?

More than 40 works are on display at Edvard Munch Portraits, spanning the artist’s entire life across four parts: his early life with his immediate family, his time in the midst of bohemian radicals, his work for patrons and collectors, and finally the paintings created to depict his closest confidants in later life, whom Munch referred to as his ‘Guardians’.

Key works on display at Edvard Munch Portraits include:

• Evening (1888)
• Andres Munch Studying Anatomy (1886)
• Self-Portrait (1882–83)
• Hans Jæger (1889)
• Tête-à-tête (1885)
• Stanisław Przybyszewski (1895)
• Thor Lütken (1892)
• Felix Auerbach (1906)
• The Brooch (1902)
• Dr Daniel Jacobson (1908)
• Jappe Nilssen (1909)
• Model with a Green Scarf (Sultan Abdul Karim) (1916)
• Seated Model on the Couch, Birgit Prestøe (1924)

We begin in the 1880s and ‘90s, when a young Munch (born 1863) crafts intimate pictures of his family, often on small pieces of card. The style is more naturalistic than the artist would later be known for – but key concepts spotted later in his oeuvre can be traced now. Evening (1888) captures Munch’s sister Laura on a family holiday, just one year before she was permanently hospitalised with schizophrenia; her isolation from her surroundings is clear, and Munch’s 1890s symbolist works are germinating.

In the mid-1880s, Munch moves from his countryside home to Oslo – then known as Kristiana – to study art formally, entering into a bohemian network of internationally-connected artists and writers, led chiefly by anarchist Hans Jæger. Munch’s portrait of Jæger (1889) dominates this section of the exhibition, and his art develops thanks to interactions with artistic circles in Paris and Berlin. This is the beginning of what he termed ‘soul art’: that distinctive, evocative style expressing love, anxiety, dread, jealousy, betrayal and more deeply-felt, deeply atmospheric emotions. In 1894, Polish writer and dramatist Stanisław Przybyszewski’s monograph Das Werk des Edvard Munch first promoted Munch internationally, hinging on the ‘Naked Soul’ as fundamental to his work.

By the early 20th century, Munch was one of Europe’s most exhibited artists, attracting patrons and collectors alike. He started to take commissions, imbuing his portraits with bold colours to mirror the dynamism of his sitters. At Edvard Munch Portraits, examples include Munch’s vibrant portrait of German physicist Felix Auerbach (1906), while visitors hailing from London should note the sensual and mysterious lithograph of Brixton-born violinist Eva Mudocci.

But by 1908, Munch was under extreme stress; he collapsed and was admitted to a Copenhagen nerve clinic, where he painted its practitioner Dr Daniel Jacobson engulfed in a rainbow of swirling colours. By 1909, a recovered Munch returned to his Norwegian homeland, a move facilitated by a group of men the artists referred to as his ‘Lifeguards’ or ‘Guardians’: close friends and supporters spanning writers, artists and patrons. These men are the final subjects of the exhibition, including Munch’s full-length portraits of Jappe Nilssen, the painter Ludvig Karsten and writer Christian Gierløff. Munch loved these men so much, their portraits were akin to a stand-in when the real people could not be around.

Evening, Edvard Munch, 1888. Oil on
canvas. (© Museo Nacional Thyssen-
Bornemisza)

Where & When?

Edvard Munch Portraits runs at the National Portrait Gallery from 13 March until 15 June 2025.

Address: St. Martin’s Pl, London WC2H 0HE

How To Get Tickets

Tickets are £21pp, or members visit for free. Visitors aged 25 and under can access £5 tickets on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.

The National Portrait Gallery is open 10.30am to 6pm Sunday to Thursday, and 10.30am to 9pm on Fridays and Saturdays. Entry timeslots for the exhibition run from 10.30am until 8pm. Members don’t need to book a timeslot.

Find out more and book at npg.org.uk