The Sick Child

The Sick Child is an oil-on-canvas painting by Edvard Munch, dated 1925 by the Munch Museum in Oslo, which owns it (MM.M.00051); it is the fifth of six painted versions of a subject he returned to for more than forty years.

The series records the last days of Munch's elder sister Johanne Sophie, who died of tuberculosis in 1877 at the age of fifteen; Munch himself had nearly died of the disease as a child. The first version, painted and scraped down repeatedly in 1885–86 and now in the National Museum, Oslo, was jeered when shown at the 1886 Autumn Exhibition in Kristiania, yet Munch later called it his first break with Impressionism. He painted further versions in 1896 (Gothenburg), 1907 (the Thiel Gallery, Stockholm, and Tate, London), this one, and a last in 1927, also in the Munch Museum.

As in every version, the red-haired girl sits propped against a large white pillow, looking towards a dark curtain often read as a symbol of death, while a dark-haired woman, probably her aunt Karen, bows her head beside her and holds her hand; their joined hands sit at the centre of the canvas. A bottle stands on the cabinet at left and a glass on the table at right. This late version, 117.5 by 116 cm and signed E Munch at upper right, is built from long, open vertical strokes, giving the scene the hazy, veiled quality critics have compared to a memory seen through tears.

The date is uncertain. The 1925 date rests on the earliest surviving record of the painting, a photograph taken in Munch's studio, and some art historians have proposed it was finished as early as 1916. It belongs to the Munch Museum, whose collection is founded on the works Munch bequeathed to the City of Oslo in 1940, and is catalogued as Woll M 1561 in the catalogue raisonné of his paintings.