Critical Debates Blog

The subject of the paintings is Munch's older sister Sophie, before her death for tuberculosis at fifteen years old. 

This tragic event heavily marked Munch’s life, also because he lost his mum for the same illness when he was just five years old.

Munch painted six variants of The Sick Child, dated from the 1880s to the late 1920s, exploring his grief with colours and oil paint.

The artist produced, also, prints on the same motif, an etching, 1894, and lithographies,1896.

The first of the painting was exhibited in Kristiania (Oslo) in 1886, he considered this painting the “genesis” of is follow work and wrote: “‘With the sick child I broke new ground – it was a breakthrough in my art.”

He painted a second version because the first painting palette was too grey, ’heavy as lead’. He used more vivid colours and focused on capturing the eyelid movements and the suffering on his sister's face using a palette knife. 

  Resources:

In this coloured etching (1810), T. Rowlandson comically illustrated an overweight man “Dropsy” wooing a tall ill woman “Consumpted”.

Today it sounds bizarre, but pulmonary tuberculosis looks in women was considered very attractive in the upper class. 

The pale skin, red cheeks and ethereal thinness were the characteristics of the femme fatal, like Marguerite Gautier in La Dame aux camellias written by Alexandre Dumas (Violetta in la Traviata composed by Giuseppe Verdi).

Likewise, the illness was improving intellectual skills and sensitivity in men, making them more “interesting” a creative, like in The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.

Tuberculosis in XIX was a tremendous, often fatal, illness until Robert Koch invented Tuberculin in 1890. 

Romanticising about TB is here brilliantly described by Susan Sontag:

“Gradually, the tubercular look, which symbolized an appealing vulnerability, a superior sensitivity, became more and more the ideal look for women—while great men of the mid-and late nineteenth century grew fat, founded industrial empires, wrote hundreds of novels, made wars, and plundered continents. One might reasonably suppose that this romanticization of TB was a merely literary transfiguration of the disease and that in the era of its great depredations TB was probably thought to be disgusting—as cancer is now. Surely everyone in the nineteenth century knew about, for example, the stench in the breath of the consumptive person. (Describing their visit to the dying Murger, the Goncourts note "the odour of rotting flesh in his bedroom.").” 

Illness as Metaphor, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978, Chapter4, page 29

 Resources:

https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/tuberculosis-a-fashionable-disease/

https://www.thecollector.com/tuberculosis-art/