Am Totenbett

Munch was 13 when his older sister Sophie died of tuberculosis in 1877, the same illness that had already taken their mother. He painted this scene nearly 20 years later, in 1895, out of that memory: the family gathered around a bed, but the dying girl hidden from us, so the grief lives entirely in the faces and turned backs of the living. He made it part of his Frieze of Life, the long cycle of pictures about love, illness and death he worked at for decades. The pale, thinned paint and the few muted colours were not carelessness. Munch scraped and diluted on purpose, wanting the surface itself to look drained.