The Murderess

In 1906 Munch was living in Germany rather than Norway, moving between spa towns and taking on theatre work. That autumn Max Reinhardt put on Ibsen's Ghosts at his Deutsches Theater in Berlin with designs by Munch, and this canvas comes from the same year. The subject had been with him for a while. In 1902, at his house in Aasgaardstrand on the Oslo fjord, a long and bitter involvement with Tulla Larsen ended with a pistol going off in a room, and Munch lost the top joint of a finger on his left hand. He came back again and again afterwards to one arrangement, a woman standing and a man lying down, and in 1907 he painted it twice more and called those two canvases the death of Marat, after the French revolutionary who was stabbed in his bath.