Laura Munch

Laura Munch was 15 in 1882, and the Munch Museum in Oslo has two oil portraits of her from that year, both by her brother Edvard, then 18. This is the plainer of the two, painted on a sheet of paper about 23.5 by 18 centimetres and never signed. She faces us squarely against a dark ground, in a dark dress with a white lace collar and a round brooch at the throat, and looks straight out. She was named after their mother, who died of tuberculosis at the end of 1868, when Laura was not yet two. Their mother's sister, Karen Bjølstad, came to run the household and bring up the five children. Laura became mentally ill while still young. For much of her adult life she was in and out of hospital, among them the Gaustad asylum, the state mental hospital outside Kristiania, as Oslo was then called. She died in 1926.