O cheiro da morte

Munch painted this in 1895, the year a show of his work in Kristiania set off a public argument about whether the artist himself was ill. The title points at a smell rather than at anything you can see, and that is the point of it. What is shown is a home just after a death, the family standing about the room with nothing left to do. Munch had been in such a room at 13, when his sister Sophie died of tuberculosis at 15, and his father, a doctor, had taken him along on visits to patients in the poorer quarters of the city. He worked here in thin tempera on unprimed canvas, so the weave drinks the paint and the surface stays dry and chalky. It is in the Munch Museum in Oslo, among the pictures he gathered under the title Frieze of Life.