''The Sick Child'' ( no, Det syke barn) is the title given to a group of six paintings and a number of
lithograph
Lithography () is a planographic method of printing originally based on the immiscibility of oil and water. The printing is from a stone (lithographic limestone) or a metal plate with a smooth surface. It was invented in 1796 by the German a ...
s,
drypoint
Drypoint is a printmaking technique of the intaglio (printmaking), intaglio family, in which an image is incised into a plate (or "matrix") with a hard-pointed "needle" of sharp metal or diamond point. In principle, the method is practically ident ...
s and
etchings
Etching is traditionally the process of using strong acid or mordant to cut into the unprotected parts of a metal surface to create a design in intaglio (incised) in the metal. In modern manufacturing, other chemicals may be used on other types ...
completed by the Norwegian artist
Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch ( , ; 12 December 1863 – 23 January 1944) was a Norwegian painter. His best known work, ''The Scream'' (1893), has become one of Western art's most iconic images.
His childhood was overshadowed by illness, bereavement and the dr ...
between 1885 and 1926. All record a moment before the death of his older sister Johanne Sophie (1862–1877) from
tuberculosis
Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease usually caused by '' Mycobacterium tuberculosis'' (MTB) bacteria. Tuberculosis generally affects the lungs, but it can also affect other parts of the body. Most infections show no symptoms, in ...
at 15. Munch returned to this deeply traumatic event repeatedly in his art, over six completed oil paintings and many studies in various media, over a period of more than 40 years. In the works, Sophie is typically shown on her deathbed accompanied by a dark-haired, grieving woman assumed to be her aunt Karen; the studies often show her in a cropped head shot. In all the painted versions Sophie is sitting in a chair, obviously suffering from pain, propped by a large white pillow, looking towards an ominous curtain likely intended as a
symbol of death. She is shown with a haunted expression, clutching hands with a grief-stricken older woman who seems to want to comfort her but whose head is bowed as if she cannot bear to look the younger girl in the eye.
Throughout his career, Munch often returned to and created several variants of his paintings. ''The Sick Child'' became for Munch—who nearly died from tuberculosis himself as a child—a means to record both his feelings of despair and guilt that he had been the one to survive and to confront his feelings of loss for his late sister. He became obsessive with the image, and during the decades that followed he created numerous versions in a variety of formats. The six painted works were executed over a period of more than 40 years, using a number of different models.
[Facos, 361]
The series has been described as "a vivid study of the ravages of a
degenerative disease
Degenerative disease is the result of a continuous process based on degenerative cell changes, affecting tissues or organs, which will increasingly deteriorate over time.
In neurodegenerative diseases, cells of the central nervous system stop wor ...
." All of the paintings and many of the ancillary works are considered significant to Munch's oeuvre. An 1896 lithograph in black, yellow and red was sold in 2001 at
Sotheby's
Sotheby's () is a British-founded American multinational corporation with headquarters in New York City. It is one of the world's largest brokers of fine and decorative art, jewellery, and collectibles. It has 80 locations in 40 countries, and ...
for $250,000.
The paintings
Each painting shows Sophie in profile, lying on her deathbed, and obviously having difficulty breathing, a symptom of advanced, severe tuberculosis.
[Cordulack, 23] She is propped from her waist up by a large thick white pillow which partially hides a large circular mirror hung on the wall behind her. She is covered by a heavy dark blanket. She has red hair and is shown as frail and with a sickly pallor and vacant stare.
She looks towards a dark and portentous full-length curtain to her left, which many art historians interpret as a symbol of death.
A dark-haired and older woman in a black dress sits by the child's bedside, holding her hand. The bond between the two is established through the joining of their hands, which are positioned at the exact center of each work. Their shared grip is typically rendered with such pathos and intensity that art historians believe that not only did the two figures share a deep emotional bond, but that they were most likely blood relations. In probability the woman is Sophie's aunt
Karen. Some critics have observed that the older woman is more distressed than the child; in the words of critic Patricia Donahue, "It is almost as though the child, knowing that nothing more can be done, is comforting a person who has reached the end of her endurance".
The woman's head is bowed in anguish to the extent that she seems unable to look directly at Sophie. Because of this, her face is obscured and the viewer can only see the top of her head. A bottle is placed on a dressing table or locker to the left. A glass can be seen to the right on a vaguely described table.
The paintings vary in their colourisation. White especially figures in the first in the series, a representation of oblivion. Later, green and yellow figure as expressive representations of sickness, while in most works the reds represent the most dramatic and physical feature of late stage tuberculosis:
coughing up blood
Hemoptysis is the coughing up of blood or blood-stained mucus from the bronchi, larynx, trachea, or lungs. In other words, it is the airway bleeding. This can occur with lung cancer, infections such as tuberculosis, bronchitis, or pneumonia, a ...
.
Style
Every piece in the series is strongly influenced by the conventions of
German Expressionism
German Expressionism () consisted of several related creative movements in Germany before the First World War that reached a peak in Berlin during the 1920s. These developments were part of a larger Expressionist movement in north and central ...
, while many are heavily
impressionistic
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage ...
in technique. The painted versions are built up from thick layers of
impasto
''Impasto'' is a technique used in painting, where paint is laid on an area of the surface thickly, usually thick enough that the brush or painting-knife strokes are visible. Paint can also be mixed right on the canvas. When dry, impasto provide ...
paint, and typically show strong broad vertical brush strokes. The emphasis on verticals gives the works a hazy feel and adds to their emotive power, an effect the art critic
Michelle Facos
Michelle Facos (born February 25, 1955) is an American writer and art historian.
Early life
A native of Buffalo, New York, Facos graduated from Kirkland (Hamilton) College in 1976 with a B.A. in art history and comparative literature. Upon gradu ...
described as presenting the viewer with "a scene experienced at close range but hazily, as if viewed through tears or the veil of memory".
Versions
Munch was only 26 when he completed the 1885–86 painting and uncertain enough of his ability, he gave it the tentative title ''Study''. Munch completed six paintings titled ''The Sick Child''. Three are now in Oslo (1885–86, 1925, 1927), the others in
Gothenburg
Gothenburg (; abbreviated Gbg; sv, Göteborg ) is the second-largest city in Sweden, fifth-largest in the Nordic countries, and capital of the Västra Götaland County. It is situated by the Kattegat, on the west coast of Sweden, and has ...
(1896), Stockholm (1907), and London (1907). He created eight studies in drypoints and etching after his breakthrough in 1892 when demand for his work grew.
The first version took over a year to complete. Munch found it an unhappy and frustrating experience, and the canvas was worked and reworked almost obsessively. Between 1885 and 1886 Munch painted, scrubbed out and repainted the image,
before finally arriving at an image he was satisfied with. He often mentioned the works in his journals and publications, and it features heavily in his "The Origin of the Frieze of Life" (''Live Friesens tilblivelse''). He later wrote that the 1885–86 painting was such a difficult struggle that its completion marked a major "breakthrough" in his art.
Munch explained: "I started as an
Impressionist
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage ...
, but during the violent mental and vital convulsions of the Bohême period Impressionism gave me insufficient expression—I had to find an expression for what stirred my mind ... The first break with Impressionism was the Sick Child—I was looking for expression (
Expressionism
Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it rad ...
)."
[Eggum, 46]
File:Munch Det Syke Barn 1896.jpg, Edvard Munch, ''The Sick Child'', 1896. The 2nd in the series was completed while the artist was living in Paris, Konstmuseet, Gothenburg
Gothenburg (; abbreviated Gbg; sv, Göteborg ) is the second-largest city in Sweden, fifth-largest in the Nordic countries, and capital of the Västra Götaland County. It is situated by the Kattegat, on the west coast of Sweden, and has ...
.
File:Edvard Munch The Sick Child Thielska 289.tif, Edvard Munch, ''The Sick Child'', 1907. 3rd in the series Oil on canvas, 118 x 120 cm Thiel Gallery
The Thiel Gallery ( sv, Thielska Galleriet) is an art museum in the Djurgården park area of Stockholm, Sweden. Represented are the members of the Artists Association (''Konstnärsförbundet'') from the early 1900s as well as one of the world's l ...
, Stockholm
File:Edvard Munch - The sick child (1907) - Tate Modern.jpg, Edvard Munch, ''The Sick Child'', 1907. 4th in the series.[''The Sick Child'', 1907]
. Tate Gallery
Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the U ...
, London. Retrieved 25 August 2012. Oil on canvas, 137 × 139 cm. Tate
Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the U ...
, London.
File:MunchDaskrankeMaedchen.JPG, Edvard Munch, ''The Sick Child'', 1925. 5th in the series. Oil on canvas, 117 × 118 cm. Munch Museum
Munch Museum ( no, Munch-museet), marketed as Munch (stylised as MUNCH) since 2020, is an art museum in Bjørvika, Oslo, Norway dedicated to the life and works of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch.
The museum was originally located at Tøyen, ...
, Oslo
File:Edvard Munch - The Sick Child - MM.M.00052 - Munch Museum.jpg, Edvard Munch, 1927. 6th in the series
The six painted versions are:
[The Sick Child 1907: Catalogue entry]
. Tate
Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the U ...
, London. Retrieved 25 August 2012.
* 1885–1886,
Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo. Impressionistic and dominated by strong vertical brush strokes, composed mostly from whites, greys and greens. Small areas were later over-painted.
* 1896,
Konstmuseet, Gothenburg. Completed while Munch was living in Paris. Mostly greens and a richer palette, though thinner brush strokes.
* 1907,
Thiel Gallery
The Thiel Gallery ( sv, Thielska Galleriet) is an art museum in the Djurgården park area of Stockholm, Sweden. Represented are the members of the Artists Association (''Konstnärsförbundet'') from the early 1900s as well as one of the world's l ...
, Stockholm. A commission from the Swedish financier and art collector
Ernest Thiel
Ernest Jacques Thiel (18 August 1859 – 6 January 1947) was a Swedish financier and art collector whose former villa in the Stockholm park area Djurgården today houses the Thiel Gallery ( sv, Thielska galleriet).
Biography
Ernest Thiel wa ...
. Thiel also commissioned from the much in demand Munch, a portrait of the banker's idol
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (; or ; 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, prose poet, cultural critic, philologist, and composer whose work has exerted a profound influence on contemporary philosophy. He began his ...
, whose work he later translated into Swedish.
*1907
Tate
Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the U ...
, London. Evidence that this work was also commissioned by Thiel. For a time this painting was believed to have been executed in 1916. The work had been in the
Gemäldegalerie,
Dresden
Dresden (, ; Upper Saxon: ''Dräsdn''; wen, label=Upper Sorbian, Drježdźany) is the capital city of the German state of Saxony and its second most populous city, after Leipzig. It is the 12th most populous city of Germany, the fourth larg ...
until 1928.
*1925 or earlier.
Munch Museum
Munch Museum ( no, Munch-museet), marketed as Munch (stylised as MUNCH) since 2020, is an art museum in Bjørvika, Oslo, Norway dedicated to the life and works of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch.
The museum was originally located at Tøyen, ...
, Oslo. The painting's dating is uncertain; some art historians have proposed a completion date as early as 1916. The later date of 1925 is based on the year of its first surviving record; photograph taken in Munch's studio.
*1927 or earlier. Munch Museum, Oslo.
Painting materials
British and Norwegian scientists have investigated the painting in the Nasjonalmuseet Oslo. The pigment analysis revealed an extensive palette consisting of pigments such as
lead white
White lead is the basic lead carbonate 2PbCO3·Pb(OH)2. It is a complex salt, containing both carbonate and hydroxide ions. White lead occurs naturally as a mineral, in which context it is known as hydrocerussite, a hydrate of cerussite. It was ...
,
zinc white
Zinc oxide is an inorganic compound with the formula . It is a white powder that is insoluble in water. ZnO is used as an additive in numerous materials and products including cosmetics, food supplements, rubbers, plastics, ceramics, glass, cement ...
, artificial
ultramarine
Ultramarine is a deep blue color pigment which was originally made by grinding lapis lazuli into a powder. The name comes from the Latin ''ultramarinus'', literally 'beyond the sea', because the pigment was imported into Europe from mines in Afgh ...
,
vermilion
Vermilion (sometimes vermillion) is a color, color family, and pigment most often made, since ancient history, antiquity until the 19th century, from the powdered mineral cinnabar (a form of mercury sulfide, which is toxic) and its correspondi ...
, red lake,
red ochre
Ochre ( ; , ), or ocher in American English, is a natural clay earth pigment, a mixture of ferric oxide and varying amounts of clay and sand. It ranges in colour from yellow to deep orange or brown. It is also the name of the colours produced ...
,
emerald green
Varieties of the color green may differ in hue, chroma (also called saturation or intensity) or lightness (or value, tone, or brightness), or in two or three of these qualities. Variations in value are also called tints and shades, a tint b ...
,
chrome yellow
__NOTOC__
Chrome yellow is a yellow pigment in paints using monoclinic lead(II) chromate (PbCrO4). It occurs naturally as the mineral crocoite but the mineral ore itself was never used as a pigment for paint. After the French chemist Louis Vau ...
,
zinc yellow
Chromate conversion coating or alodine coating is a type of conversion coating used to passivate steel, aluminium, zinc, cadmium, copper, silver, titanium, magnesium, and tin alloys. The coating serves as a corrosion inhibitor, as a primer ...
, and
cobalt blue
Cobalt blue is a blue pigment made by sintering cobalt(II) oxide with aluminum(III) oxide (alumina) at 1200 °C. Chemically, cobalt blue pigment is cobalt(II) oxide-aluminium oxide, or cobalt(II) aluminate, CoAl2O4. Cobalt blue is lighter ...
.
Themes
In 1930, Munch wrote to the director of Oslo's National Gallery admitting that "As for the sick child, it was the period I think of as the Age of the Pillow. A great many painters did pictures of sick children on their pillows." Munch was referring to the prevalence of tuberculosis at the time; contemporary
depictions of the disease can be seen in the works of
Hans Heyerdahl
Hans Olaf Halvor Heyerdahl (8 July 1857 – 10 October 1913) was a Norwegian Realist painter. His work was characterized by naturalism and focused largely on portraits and landscape paintings.
Biography
Heyerdahl was born in Smedjebacken, Swede ...
and
Christian Krohg
Christian Krohg (13 August 1852 – 16 October 1925) was a Norwegian naturalist painter, illustrator, author and journalist. Krohg was inspired by the realism art movement and often chose motifs from everyday life. He was the director and s ...
.
Reception
When the 1885–86 original version was first exhibited at the 1886 Autumn Exhibition in
Christiania, it was jeered by spectators and drew "a veritable storm of protest and indignation" from critics dismayed at his use of impressionistic techniques, his seeming abandonment of line, and the fact that the painting seemed to be unfinished. Many found it unsatisfactory that the key passage in the painting - the women's joined hands - was not well detailed, there are no lines to describe their fingers and the centerpiece essentially comprises blobs of paint. In defence Munch said, "I don't paint what I see but what I saw."
The exhibition was reviewed by the critic Andreas Aubert, who wrote: "There is genius in Munch. But there is also the danger that it will go to the dogs ... For this reason, for Munch's own sake, I would wish that his Sick Child had been refused ... In its present form this 'study'(!) is merely a discarded half-rubbed-out sketch."
Over 40 years later, the
Nazi
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...
s deemed Munch's paintings "
degenerate art
Degenerate art (german: Entartete Kunst was a term adopted in the 1920s by the Nazi Party in Germany to describe modern art. During the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, German modernist art, including many works of internationally renowned artists, ...
" and removed them from German museums. The works, which included the 1907 version of ''The Sick Child'' from the
Dresden Gallery
Dresden (, ; Upper Saxon: ''Dräsdn''; wen, label= Upper Sorbian, Drježdźany) is the capital city of the German state of Saxony and its second most populous city, after Leipzig. It is the 12th most populous city of Germany, the fourth lar ...
, were taken to Berlin to be auctioned. Norwegian art dealer Harald Holst Halvorsen acquired several, including ''The Sick Child'', with the goal of returning them to
Oslo
Oslo ( , , or ; sma, Oslove) is the capital and most populous city of Norway. It constitutes both a county and a municipality. The municipality of Oslo had a population of in 2022, while the city's greater urban area had a population of ...
. The 1907 painting was purchased by Thomas Olsen in 1939 and donated to the
Tate Gallery
Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the U ...
.
Legacy
On 15 February 2013, four Norwegian postage stamps were published by
Posten Norge
Posten Norge () is the name of the Norwegian postal service. The company, owned by the Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications had a monopoly until 2016 on distribution of letters weighing less than 50g throughout the country. There a ...
, reproducing images from Munch's art to recognise the 150th anniversary of his birth. A close-up of the child's head from one of the lithographic versions was used for the design of the 15
krone stamp.
Munch’s “The Scream” on a Postage Stamp
/ref>
References
Notes
Sources
* Bischoff Ulrich. ''Edvard Munch: 1863–1944''. Berlin: Taschen, 2000.
* Cordulack, Shelley Wood. ''Edvard Munch and the Physiology of Symbolism''. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002.
* Eggum, Arne. ''Edvard Munch: Paintings, Sketches, and Studies''. New York: C.N. Potter, 1984. .
* Facos, Michelle. ''An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Art''. Routledge, 2011.
External links
* ''The Sick Child'' at the Tate
Display caption
Catalogue entry
Illustrated companion
*
Edvard Munch, ''The Sick Child''
Nasjonalmuseet Oslo, at ColourLex
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sick Child, The
Paintings by Edvard Munch
Symbolist paintings
Modern paintings
Painting series
Collection of the Tate galleries
Paintings in the collection of the Munch Museum
Collections of the Gothenburg Museum of Art
Paintings in the collection of the National Gallery (Norway)
Paintings in Stockholm
1886 paintings
1896 paintings
1907 paintings
1920s paintings
Painting controversies