Death Struggle

In 1915 Munch was finishing the biggest public commission of his life, the wall paintings for the assembly hall of the university in Kristiania, as Oslo was then called, with a rising sun filling the end wall. They were installed the following year, and the fee bought him Ekely, the property on the edge of the city where he spent the rest of his life. Through those same years he kept returning to a much smaller room. The deathbed in this picture is his sister Sophie's. She died of tuberculosis in 1877, at 15. He was 13. He had first painted the scene in the 1890s and came back to it again and again, this time on a canvas nearly two metres wide, signed and dated in the upper right corner, E. Munch 1915.