Der Geruch des Todes

Munch spent the middle of the 1890s painting the same room again and again: a bed, a body in it, and a family standing around not looking at one another. He had watched his mother die of tuberculosis when he was five and his sister Sophie die of it when he was 13, in a house in Kristiania where the illness kept coming back.

The odd thing about this one is the title. A picture can show a sickroom. It cannot show a smell, and he named it after the one thing the paint could not reach. He worked in tempera on canvas he left unprimed, so the cloth drinks the colour and the surface stays dry and matt. In 1895 he showed pictures of this kind in Kristiania and the reaction was loud enough that the students' society held a public debate on whether he was mentally ill.