The Infirmary at Helgelandsmoen

Helgelandsmoen was an army camp on the plain near Hønefoss, north-west of Kristiania, as Oslo was then called. It was set up in 1868 for the conscripts of an Akershus infantry brigade, who drilled there in summer. Munch knew the place from his teens. His father, an army doctor, served at the camp around 1880, and the young Edvard spent summers there. The Munch Museum keeps drawings he made at Helgelandsmoen in 1879 and 1882. This oil on cardboard, which the museum dates to 1884, takes us inside the sick bay. It is an attic room under a steep, reddish roof, with plain wooden beds pushed close together. A woman in a white headscarf bends toward a man lying back on his pillow, and in the foreground a young man in dark clothes sits with his legs stretched out across a bed. Munch signed it with a single letter, an E, in the lower left corner.