Der Todesengel

Munch painted this in 1893, the same year he made the first version of The Scream. He was then pulling his work into a single cycle he later called the Frieze of Life, a series about love, dread and dying, and death kept pushing to the front of it. He had reason. Tuberculosis took his mother when he was 5, and his older sister Sophie when he was 13. He sat by her bed as she died at 15. Those sickrooms surface again and again in his art of the early 1890s, and this is one of them. Like many of these pieces it is painted not on canvas but on cheap, unprimed cardboard, barely 60 centimetres tall.