Christian Munch on the Couch

This was painted in Kristiania, today's Oslo, around 1883, when Edvard Munch was about 20 and still working in a plain, observed style. The man resting on the couch is his father, Christian Munch, an army doctor who had raised his children in cramped rented flats after their mother died of tuberculosis. Another daughter, Edvard's sister Sophie, had died of the same illness a few years earlier. The father was deeply religious and given to long, dark moods, and the boy grew up inside that mixture of prayer and grief. None of the later Munch is here yet, no Scream, no swirling colour. There is only a tired man lying down in the evening light of a Norwegian household, watched closely by a son who would spend the rest of his life painting the fear and loss he first learned in these rooms. Christian died in 1889, while Edvard was away in France.