Description
Death in the Sickroom
Death in the Sickroom by Edvard Munch is a large painting of 1893 that carries inventory number NG.M.00940 at the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) in Oslo. It measures 169.5 x 152.5 cm and shows an almost bare room with a high ceiling and a plank floor. The dying sister sits in a tall wickerback chair seen from behind, so that she herself is nearly hidden. The family stands around her: a young woman in a dark dress looks straight out at us, another is turned away, a bowed figure kneels at the front, an older man sits at the right with his hands clasped, a further woman stands beside him, and at the far left a man by the wall turns away. This is the version our hand-painted reproduction follows.
The scene returns to the death of the painter’s sister Johanne Sophie, who died of tuberculosis in 1877. Munch did not paint his brothers and sisters as the children they were then, however, but as the adults they were when he made the picture. Memory and present stand in the same room.
The strongest thing in the work is what is absent: none of those present looks at anyone else. Each is alone with a thought, no glance meets another, and the floor rises steeply towards the back so that the room reads more like a stage than a real space. Munch laid the colour on thin and dry, in places thin enough for the canvas to show through; besides oil he used tempera and wax crayon.
Our reproduction is hand-painted throughout in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke and always to order; it is not a print. Because every canvas is made individually, tones and strokes differ slightly from one copy to the next.
The painting is large and quiet, so it needs a wide wall and some distance – a living room, a gallery corridor or a space that can be viewed from several metres. Its muted greens, browns and greys sit well with warm wood and neutral walls; because the motif is crowded with figures, there should not be too many other pictures around it.
It is available in ten sizes, from a smaller horizontal format to a very large canvas, and we can also make it to a size you specify. Other works by the same artist are among the paintings of Edvard Munch, and his life and work are covered in the biography of Edvard Munch.
| Year: | 1893 |
| Original size: | 169.5 cm x 152.5 cm |
| Style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil, tempera and wax crayon on canvas |
| Located at: | National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet), Oslo |
