The Son

Munch painted this domestic interior in 1904, and its quiet is worth pausing on, coming as it does from the man who had made The Scream. That year his fortunes were turning. After a decade of scandal and thin sales at home in Norway, it was Germany that finally took him up. Collectors in Lubeck and Berlin were buying, the Berlin Secession showed his work, and German dealers put him under contract. So this ordinary scene of a son indoors belongs to a steadier stretch of his life than the anxious pictures he is famous for. Munch held on to it, as he did to thousands of works, and left the whole lot to the city of Oslo, where it stayed in the museum built to house them.