Edvard Munch Art Prints

In 1864, when he was a baby, his family moved to Christiania, today's Oslo, and illness and loss overshadowed his childhood: his mother died of tuberculosis in 1868, and his favourite sister, Sophie, died of it at 15. Often kept home from school through the winters, he drew to pass the time. He later wrote that "the angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born."

In Kristiania's bohemian circle, the writer Hans Jæger urged him to "write his life", to paint his own emotional and psychological state. The Sick Child (1886), based on Sophie's death, was his first "soul painting" and his break from Impressionism, and critics called him a madman for it. In Paris in 1889 he studied how Gauguin, van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec used colour to carry emotion.

Anxiety (1894) borrows the diagonal railing and blood-red sky of The Scream and fills the bridge with pale faces staring straight out at you. In Ashes, a man hunches over in shame beside a wide-eyed, dishevelled woman, and Munch later wrote on a lithograph of the scene, "I felt our love lying on the earth like a heap of ash". Vampire was never Munch's title; a critic friend named it, while Munch insisted it showed "just a woman kissing a man on the neck". In The Kiss (1897), the lovers' faces merge into one featureless shape.

Over half his paintings are landscapes, though he is rarely thought of as a landscape painter. Starry Night (1893) looks out over the shore at Åsgårdstrand from the hotel window where he first fell in love. After a breakdown in 1908 and months in a clinic, his work turned more colourful and less pessimistic, and a stylised version of The Sun later appeared on Norway's 1,000-kroner note. He died at his Ekely home in January 1944 and left his remaining work to Oslo, which built the Munch Museum.