Inger in Black and Violet

Edvard Munch painted his younger sister Inger in 1892, standing full length in a dark dress against a cool violet ground, hands folded, her face giving almost nothing away. The Munch family had been shadowed by illness and early death. Their mother and an older sister both died of tuberculosis when Edvard was still a boy. Inger was the one who stayed close and lived long, into the 1950s, and it was she who later looked after his letters and his memory. This is one of his first large, formal portraits, and he treats her with a plain, upright seriousness. The same year he painted it, his work was causing an open scandal in Berlin, where an exhibition of his was shut down within a week of opening.