Primavera

Munch painted this large, sunlit scene in 1889, and it does not look like the Munch most people carry in their heads. A convalescent girl sits by a window, a woman beside her, and light pours in across them, carefully observed, almost academic. He had already tried the same subject once, in the raw and scandalous Sick Child, and satisfied nobody. Here he did it again, calmly and expertly, and this time it worked. The painting helped win him a state grant that same year to go and study in Paris. Munch himself called it his farewell to impressionism and realism. The theme underneath was his own. He had watched both his mother and his sister die young of tuberculosis, and the breeze at that bright window is moving through a sickroom.