Bleeding Man and Sunflower

Munch painted this in 1903, one of the hardest stretches of his life. The year before, his long and tormented affair with Tulla Larsen had ended when a revolver went off during a quarrel and injured his left hand, and that violence haunted his imagination for years. Here a man bleeds beside a single upright sunflower, the flower of the sun set against the failing figure. The canvas is tall and narrow, just over a metre high, and Munch never signed it. He kept it with him for the rest of his life, part of the enormous body of work he left to the city of Oslo when he died in 1944.