Death and the Child

Death and the Child is an oil painting on unprimed canvas by Edvard Munch, dated 1899 and held by MUNCH, the Munch Museum in Oslo (MM.M.00420, catalogue raisonné Woll M 446); the wide canvas measures 104.5 × 179.5 cm.

The picture goes back to Munch's own childhood. His mother died of tuberculosis in 1868, when he was five, and his elder sister Sophie died of the same disease nine years later. Munch had sketched the motif of a child beside a dead mother as early as 1889, and in 1893 he painted two related deathbed scenes without the child, Death and Spring and The Angel of Death, which the museum lists among the related works.

In this version the scene opens into a broad, bare room with a terracotta-red floor and dark green walls, colours that also appear in Death in the Sickroom of 1893. A woman lies in a white bed at the right. In the background stand figures whose poses repeat those of that earlier painting and who can be read as members of Munch's family: from the left, his youngest sister Inger, his aunt Karen and his father Christian standing back to back, Munch himself turned away, and his brother Andreas in a pose recalling Melancholy. In front of them a small girl in a red dress, usually identified as Sophie, who was six when their mother died, presses her hands to her head and faces the viewer. She belongs to a different moment from the adults behind her, so the painting folds the moment of death and its long aftermath into one image.

Munch later reduced the composition to an upright canvas showing only the child and the dead mother; that version was bought by the Kunsthalle Bremen in 1918, the first Munch painting acquired by a German museum. He also turned the motif into a drypoint, The Dead Mother and her Child, in 1901.