Seated Nude

1902 was one of the worst years of Munch's life. That summer, in his cottage on the Norwegian coast, an argument with Tulla Larsen, the woman he had been engaged to and could neither marry nor leave, ended with a pistol going off and a bullet through his left hand. He never got the full use of the finger back. He painted this seated nude the same year, and none of that shows in it: a model in a warm interior, the body built up in whites and soft peach against a room of loose, shifting colour, the pose quiet and self-possessed. Women had been his great subject all through the 1890s, and the wreck of the Larsen affair only pressed harder on it. It hangs now in Hannover, in the Sprengel Museum, among the German painters who took Munch as a starting point.