On the Operating Table

On the evening of 11 September 1902, in Munch's summer house at Åsgårdstrand on the Oslo fjord, a revolver went off during a quarrel with Tulla Larsen, the woman he had been involved with for four years. Who reached for the gun first has never been settled, and Munch said he could not remember. The bullet went through the middle finger of his left hand, the hand that held his palette. The next morning he took the steamer alone to the Rikshospitalet in Kristiania, as Oslo was then called. He refused chloroform, and the surgeons removed the bone splinters under a local anaesthetic of cocaine.

Within months he had painted the scene. He lies naked on the table with blood spreading across the sheet, a nurse holds a bowl of it, and three doctors in white stand behind him. At the upper right a crowd of faces looks in through a window. Tulla Larsen never came back to Åsgårdstrand, and the finger stayed shorter for the rest of his life.