Karen Bjølstad

Through the winter of 1885 and 1886 Munch was struggling with one canvas, a picture of a dying girl that he painted, scrubbed out and painted again for months. Beside the girl sits a dark-haired woman with her head bowed, usually taken to be his aunt, Karen Bjølstad. This small portrait of her comes from those same months. Karen was his late mother's sister, who had kept the family household going since 1868 and had encouraged the boy to draw. When the dying girl, later called The Sick Child, went on show in Kristiania in 1886, one critic dismissed it as a discarded, half-rubbed-out sketch. The portrait of Karen, barely 29 centimetres high, is now in Bergen, in the collection of the businessman Rasmus Meyer, who began buying Munch in 1906 and wanted to show the painter's development through all its stages.