Edvard Munch

Lithograph printed in brownish red, salmon pink, red and pale yellow with highlights in white crayon, 1896, a rare impression of Woll's fourth state of ten before the signature in the stone, signed in pencil, on wove paper

With margins, in good condition apart from a neatly repaired tear to the upper margin measuring approximately 32mm from the edge of the sheet not affecting the image, two rubbed areas to the upper margin at the edge of the image, slight paper discoloration to the margins, remains of hinges at intervals at edge of sheet verso, uneven backboard-staining, framed.
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Using his aunt and a young girl called Betzy Nielsen as models; Edvard Munch began work in 1885 on a canvas depicting the tragic death of his sister Sophie. The artist's eldest and favourite sister died of tuberculosis in 1877 at the age of fifteen, the disease that had killed his mother ten years earlier. Munch was only fourteen at the time. The trauma of his sister's death haunted him throughout his entire life and is a recurrent and major theme in his graphic and painted works. Munch, who worked on the 1885 painting over several months, referred to it as 'a breakthrough in his art' and subsequently painted several versions of the subject. Nine years later, in 1894, he revisited the subject in a drypoint, one of his first attempts at printmaking, followed in 1896 by an etching and his most famous coloured lithograph, of which this impression is a fine example.

Touching on the fragility of existence The Sick Child plays a crucial role in Munch's Frieze of Life, a series of works exploring the theme of love, anxiety, life and death.

The lithograph is the only print retaining the orientation of the paintings; the others are all in reverse. But here the artist concentrated on Sophie's head blurring out her link with human contact and removed the grieving woman as well as the domestic details present in the periphery of the painting (in some impressions of this subject he has added the mourner's head in watercolour).

Printed with Auguste Clot in Paris, the artist demonstrates great technical expertise by producing a total of five colour stones which allow an incredible number of variations. The artist uses each combination of colours to express his varying psychological moods and to generate different emotional responses; leaving the viewer to their individual interpretation of the moment. The present work printed with four stones in a gradation of red not only intensifies the emotion and tension already present in this masterpiece but also evokes the bloody signs of the deadly infectious tuberculosis.

'I regard this lithograph as my most important graphic work'.

Edvard Munch to Kristian Schreiner, quoted in: Gerd Woll, Edvard Munch, The Complete Graphic Works, London, 2001, p. 14.