torial treatment, and first and last a more soulful quality are
the marks of his manner.

Morning, by Edvard Munch

Even Munch's purely realistic portraits of a remote date,
such as the wonderful likeness of Hans Jæger, show an
intuitive perception of personality and an unexampled ability
in concentrating
characteristics and
making them ex-
pressive of mood.
As the anarchistic
reformer of society
sits there, for the
moment flagging
and disappointed,
bitter and poor and
freezing in a cold
back room, with hat
and coat on and with
a glass before him,
the picture presents
not only Hans Jæ-
ger himself in an hour of disillusion, but the whole sum of
pessimism and contempt for humanity that marked the
Bohemians of the eighties. As regards pure painting,
Munch's portrait of himself from the year 1895 is probably
not on a par with the Jæger portrait; the coloring is thinner
in its blue uniformity. Yet what spiritual exaltation shines
out from the canvas! This proud and lonely man, standing
before our eyes as in a vision, illumined by the sheen of mys-
tical footlights and wrapped in blue shadows, is the magician
who has produced Edvard Munch's remarkable, painful and
yet irradiating art.

It was in 1883 that Munch showed his first picture, entitled
The Sick Child. This painting, now universally recognized
as one of the masterpieces in Norwegian art, so sensitive in
conception, so powerful in handling, so exuberant in pictorial
effect, and so sublimely simple in theme as it is, did not at the
time of its appearance gain general acceptation, even among

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