Caricature Portrait of Tulla Larsen

Munch's affair with Tulla Larsen, the daughter of a wealthy Oslo wine merchant, ended badly. During a final confrontation in 1902 a revolver went off and blew away part of the middle finger of his left hand. Accounts still differ over whose hand was on the gun. He carried that injury, and a lasting bitterness, for the rest of his life. He painted this double portrait of the two of them around 1905, in a deliberately unflattering, cartoonish key. Some time later he took a saw to the canvas and cut it straight down the middle, splitting himself from her. The two halves were kept apart for decades and were shown side by side again only in a London exhibition in 2019.