The Sick Child

When Munch showed this at the Kristiania autumn exhibition in 1886, he called it only 'Study,' and many visitors were offended. The surface looked scraped and half-finished, wiped down with a palette knife. He was chasing a memory rather than a tidy picture. The red-haired girl propped against the white pillow is his sister Sophie, who died of tuberculosis in 1877 at 15, in a city where the disease was everywhere. The bowed woman beside her is their aunt, unable to meet the child's eyes. Munch scratched and repainted this surface over the following months, and X-rays show how much lies buried under what we finally see. He came back to the same dying girl for the rest of his life, painting her at least five more times across about 40 years.