Andreas Munch Studying Anatomy

1886 was the year Munch put The Sick Child into the autumn exhibition in Kristiania and was told by reviewers that he had hung an unfinished smear of paint. He was 22 and still living at home. This much quieter picture comes from the same year and the same flat. It shows his younger brother Peter Andreas, who had begun medical studies the autumn before, bent over a human skull, with a sawn half skull beside it on the table. Their father was an army doctor, and the household had already lost their mother and a sister to tuberculosis. Munch places himself behind his brother, so the face is barely readable, and gives the two skulls as much of the picture as the sitter. Andreas qualified, and died of pneumonia in 1895, aged 30, a few months before his daughter was born.