Edvard Munch – The Sick Child

The Sick Child

The Sick Child by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas from 1885-1886, held by the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) in Oslo under inventory number NG.M.00839. It measures 118.5 x 120 cm and shows a pale, red-haired girl propped against a large white pillow, her face in profile, looking towards a dark full-length curtain at her side. A woman in black sits at the bedside with her head bowed, holding the girl’s hand; their joined hands sit at the exact centre of the canvas. A bottle and a glass stand on the small table to the left. This is the version our hand-painted reproduction follows.

The motif comes from the death of the painter’s elder sister Johanne Sophie, who died of tuberculosis in 1877 at the age of fifteen. Munch, who had nearly died of the same disease as a child, returned to the scene for more than forty years and painted it in six versions; this is the first of them. He never named the bowed woman, and art history assumes she is his aunt Karen. The dark curtain beside the girl is likewise an interpretation rather than a fact: many read it as a sign of death.

Munch scraped and repainted the surface again and again until the paint layer took on a scratched, almost worn texture. The traces of that process are still visible on the canvas and are part of the painting, not damage. When the work was first exhibited in Kristiania in 1886 the critics received it harshly, precisely because of how it was painted; today it counts as the work in which Munch broke with the naturalist painting of his time.

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 quiet and dark, so it works best on a wall out of direct sun – in a bedroom, a study or a library, where it has some calm wall around it. Its palette of olive, brown and grey-white tones sits well with warm wood and with neutral or darker walls. Because the format is almost square, it stands on its own and does not need a pair.

It is available in ten sizes, from a smaller square format to a 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.