Edvard Munch – The Sick Child

The Sick Child

The Sick Child by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1885-1886, held under inventory number NG.M.00839 by the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 118.5 x 120 cm and is almost square. The scene is a sickbed: a pale, red-haired girl is propped against a large white pillow and looks to one side.

We see the girl in profile; the face is drawn and light, the hair red and loose across the pillow. She looks towards a dark curtain that hangs at her side and runs the full height of the canvas. 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 and are the meaning-centre of the scene as well. A bottle and a glass stand on the small table at the left. The background is indeterminate and dark, without walls and without windows; the room is not measured but only sensed.

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; that too is an interpretation and not the painter’s own record.

It was the technique that made the work a scandal at the time. Munch laid the paint on, scraped it back and laid it on again, so that the surface is broken and in places almost damaged; the traces of scraping are visible all over the canvas. The colour is thin and grey, with the red hair and the white of the pillow as the only bright accents. The painting is not finished in the sense the period meant by the word, and that was precisely its purpose.

Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas, brush stroke by brush stroke, made to order and never a print. Because every canvas is made individually, tones and strokes differ slightly from one to the next; those small differences are the mark of a hand rather than a flaw. The hardest passage here is the face, which must stay pale and translucent without becoming empty. Among reproductions of famous paintings this motif asks above all for restraint: every added detail takes force away from it.

The format is almost square and the scene quiet and serious, so the painting needs a calm wall and some distance: a living room, a study or a gallery corridor. A light, neutral wall serves it best; beside a strong colour the greyness of the scene loses its tension. Hang it at eye level in soft, even light. Among reproductions on canvas this one should not be placed among loud motifs; the work carries, and indeed asks for, a place of its own.

Ten sizes are available along with a custom size, and every canvas can be ordered framed or unframed. You choose the frame in our 3D app, where mouldings and colours can be tried against this motif; a plain dark or natural moulding works better here than an ornamented one. More of the artist is in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and painting on the Edvard Munch blog.