Jealousy

The green face in front belongs to a real man Munch knew, the Polish writer Stanisław Przybyszewski, and the scene behind him comes out of Munch's own life. In the mid 1890s Munch was drawn to Przybyszewski's wife, Dagny Juell, and that tangle sits behind this picture. She stands in the background under an apple tree with another man, while Przybyszewski looms in the foreground, his skin sickly and greenish, staring past everything. The jealousy is not shown as an event. It is shown as a colour spreading over a face. Munch could not leave the subject alone. He returned to it for decades and painted it, by most counts, no fewer than 11 times.