By the Deathbed (Fever)

“Illness, madness and death were the black angels that watched over my cradle and have since followed me through life” Munch wrote in his notes -- almost as an explanation for all the death-related motifs that were to form a large and significant part of his pictorial world. One of Munch's earliest memories was of his mother confined with tuberculosis gazing wistfully from her chair at the fields that stretched outside the window of their house in Kristiania (now Oslo). She died in 1868, leaving Edvard, who was 5, his three sisters and a younger brother in the care of her much older husband, Christian, who was a doctor imbued with a religiosity that often darkened into gloomy fanaticism. Edvard's aunt Karen came to live with the family, but the boy's deepest affection was for Sophie, his older sister. Her death nine years later at age 15, also of tuberculosis, traumatized him for life. Dying, she asked to be lifted out of bed and placed in a chair; Munch, who painted many compositions of her illness and last days, kept that chair until his own death.