How does this artwork elucidate its Further versions?
The earliest sketch of the motif is from the year 1889. Munch completed the initial painting between 1897 and 1899 which is located today in the Munch Museum in Oslo. It is drawn with a casein technique which gives the painting a dreamlike transparency. Unlike the painting from 1899 it is laid out in a landscape format and gives an insight into the wide, empty hospital room. The colouring, in particular the terracotta-red floor and the dark green walls, picks up the colours from other depictions of death by Munch, like Death in the Sickroom. The figures in the background also take poses from it, so that they can be identified as members of Munch’s family: from the left there is his youngest sister Inger facing the viewer, back to back his aunt Karen and his father Christian, Munch, who is turned away, and his brother Andreas in a pose that reminds of the painting Melancholy.The girl in the foreground is Munch’s older sister Sophia, who was six years old at the time of her mother’s death. Unlike the people becoming blurry in the background, she instantly catches the eye with her red dress and her presence. In a way she serves as a spokesperson for the other family members and expresses their grief very directly. However, she is from another time than the adults in the background, so that Munch blends together two layers of time: the instantaneous tragedy of death and his effects on the remaining for years to come.According to Ulrich Bischoff, the change of the first painting of 1897/99 to the second one from the Kunsthalle Bremen was typical for the artistic radicalization of Munch, which is carried out in the composition as well as the painting technique. With the change from landscape format to portrait format, the psychologizing depiction of the family and the sick room is omitted. Only the child at her mother’s deathbed is left. The painting technique also changed: The wet oil paint covers the canvas only at a few spots (collar and sleeves of the child), the facial features are drawn with oil pastel. The  girl sticks out from the red-brownish floor into the dark blue area of death. Thus, it connects life and death.A mirrored version of the motif is found on an etching made in 1901. Prints of the etching are shown, among others, in the Munch Museum and the Norwegian National Gallery in Oslo, as well as in Bremen, Chemitz, Hamburg, Leipzig, and Mannheim for the German-speaking areas.			
			
		
		
			
			
		
Two predecessors of the motif from 1893 depict the deceased mother in the deathbed without the child or other griefing relatives. They are very different in scenery as well as in style, although both were made in 1893. Death and Spring makes an allegorical statement on the nature of death and is thereby kept areal and synthetic, The Angel of Death visualizes a concrete scene and is painted in a rather impressionist manner. Reinhold Heller concludes from this that Munch used to adjust the style to the subject of his paintings.
impressionist Norwegian National Gallery Kunsthalle Bremen Oslo oil pastel allegorical Melancholy synthetic National Gallery casein etching Bremen Munch Museum