The Death of Marat

The Death of Marat is an oil painting on canvas by Edvard Munch, dated 1906–1907 and held by MUNCH, the Munch Museum in Oslo (MM.M.00172, catalogue raisonné Woll M 743); at about 70.5 × 76 cm it is the smallest of his three paintings with this title.

The subject grew out of Munch's relationship with Tulla Larsen, the daughter of a wealthy Norwegian wine merchant, whom he met in 1898. In 1902, during a quarrel at his summer house in Åsgårdstrand, a revolver went off and Munch lost the top joint of the middle finger of his left hand; who held the gun is not known. From 1905 he returned to the event in drawings, prints and paintings showing a man bleeding on a bed with a woman standing beside him, under titles such as Murder and The Murderess. The museum lists a painting called Murder of 1906 among the related works.

In the Marat pictures Munch joined this private story to the killing of the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat by Charlotte Corday in 1793, the subject of Jacques-Louis David's famous painting. Where David showed only the dying Marat, Munch made the woman the centre of the scene. In this version she stands naked and upright at the right, facing the viewer, while the man lies stretched out on a blue sheet behind her. Two larger canvases followed in 1907: The Death of Marat I, painted in heavy impasto in Berlin that spring, and The Death of Marat II, made six months later in Warnemünde with long horizontal and vertical strokes.

Munch told his friend Christian Gierløff that he had carried the idea of the Marat picture for nine years, that it had taken great effort, and that he saw it as an experiment rather than a main work. He also made a lithograph of the motif, and the museum keeps several sketches for it from 1906–1907.