The painting is typical of Munch's many full-length portraits, a genre he worked with extensively in the years 1902--1909, a period when he established himself as a modern portrait painter in Germany. The figure stands facing us frontally in a shallow pictorial space with a minimum of elements that define the setting. The viewer is placed in direct dialogue with the subject. Even so, little is known about the depicted man, other than that he was a French-Swiss littérateur by the name of Archinard, with whom Munch was acquainted during his time in Berlin (Thiis 1933, 282). Here we see him dressed in a three-piece suit, with a red necktie strategically placed to provide a dash of colour. The moustache, well-groomed beard and the elegant, pointed shoes reinforce the impression of an urbane, fashion-conscious figure. His pose with a cigarette in one hand attracts comparison with *Self-Portrait with Cigarette * (The National Museum, NG.M.00470). Munch also painted a smaller portrait of the same man (Woll 2008, M 577).
Many of Munch's portraits from this period were commissions, but some were the outcome of the artist's own initiative, as may be the case here. Evidently the work was considered significant, because it featured in a major exhibition of portraits at the Kunstsalon Cassirer in Berlin in the winter of 1904-1905, together with Munch's portraits of Henrik Ibsen, Max Linde and August Strindberg.
The work was purchased for the National Gallery from a solo exhibition at Blomqvist (Kristiania) in 1909, along with four other pictures. The dating has been debated. In several exhibitions that showed the work during Munch's lifetime, it was attributed to 1901. According to a number of more recent scholars, however, a more likely date is 1904 (Eggum 1994; Lange 2004; Woll 2008). The work was probably exhibited for the first time in 1904 (Heilbut 1904), a claim corroborated by a passage in Hermann Schlittgen's book Erinnerungen(Schlittgen 1926, 244). Munch painted a portrait of Schlittgen, which in this book is dated to 1904 (Woll 2008, M 579). Schlittgen's text suggests that the portrait of Archinard was produced at roughly the same time. In later years, the two portraits have often been compared as contrasting character portraits, the *Frenchman *and the German respectively (Eggum 1994). Munch himself mentions the painting in a note dated 1904--1905 (emunch.no: MM N 31). Several other surviving letters suggest that the artist and his subject were in regular contact in the years 1903-1905 (emunch.no: MM K 1866; MM K 1867; MM K 1868; MM K 1895: MM K 1897).
Øystein Ustvedt
The text was first published in Edvard Munch in the National Museum. A comprehensive overview (Oslo: National Museum, 2022).
