La Mort et l'Enfant

Munch grew up inside sickness. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was five, and his older sister Sophie died of the same disease when he was 14, a loss he returned to for the rest of his life. This version, painted in 1899, is one of several works drawn from those deathbeds. A small girl in a red dress stands at the front, turned out toward us, while the grieving adults blur into the room behind her. She holds her hands to her ears, shut inside her own fear. In 1918 the Kunsthalle in the German city of Bremen bought this canvas, the first painting by Munch to enter a German public collection. The red of the child's dress is the one warm note in a cold room.