Hans Heyerdahl

In 1881 a young Norwegian painter sent a canvas to the Paris Salon called The Dying Child, and it carried a private grief inside it. The dying child is Heyerdahl himself, remembered from his own boyhood in Drammen, and the woman leaning over the bed is his mother. He had watched a scene like this and painted himself as the crying boy at the foot of the bed. The picture won a prize that paid for two years in Italy.

Heyerdahl had trained in Munich and then Paris in the late 1870s, and he brought that French naturalism home to Christiania, today's Oslo, where he gave private lessons to keep a studio going. His summers he spent painting on the coast at Åsgårdstrand, a small resort town, and it was there that a much younger Edvard Munch, still finding his way, watched him work and took encouragement from him.

He kept to portraits and landscapes for the rest of his life, and his name faded as Munch's grew. The Dying Child now hangs in the National Museum in Oslo, a few rooms from the painter he once helped.