Explore the Description of this artwork, Death and the Child.
The picture is a bit higher than it is wide. Shown from above, a small child with blonde hair is depicted in the left half of the painting, who is facing the viewer, standing in front of the bed of a dead or dying woman to whom she has turned her back. Her arms are raised, the hands seem to be pressed against the ears, the head is slightly lowered. Her facial expression is unhappy, the blue eyes are wide open. The child is wearing a white top whose sleeves go up to the elbows or have slipped back, underneath a knee-long, pale purple dress with black stockings and dark boots. The toes almost reach to the lower edge of the painting. The shadow is cast from this point diagonally to the right rear, so that it creates a connection between the child figure that is turned away from the bed and the lying figure in the background. This figure is bedded in a bed or a sofa, whose bottom edge begins at about the height of the lower third of the painting and whose headboard is on the right half of the painting. The head of the dark-haired woman is depicted in profile and rests deeply with closed eyes in a white, puffy pillow. A part of her white covered upper body is also seen, the arms seem to be crossed on the breast. The greenish blanket is moved back until beneath the thorax. Her colour fades almost unnoticeably into the grey-greenish wall behind the bed, while the dull orange of the floor reoccurs in the shadow on both sides of the pillow and creates a resemblance with bloodstains. The dead woman herself seems to be extremely gaunt and worn out and the colour of her skin is barely distinguishable from that of the pillowcase. She is in stark contrast to the healthy skin colour and the tense posture of the child figure, who seems to try to hold off the impressions of death.
The painting allows for associations with traumatic experiences from the childhood and youth of the painter. Munch lost his mother to tuberculosis  at the age of five and nine years later one of his sisters, Sophie, who had suffered from the same deadly disease. His sister Laura became depressed.A commentor stated on the painting that Munch created “devastating figures of expression that directly touch the viewer. The silent horror of the child in face of the dead mother” proves to be “a variant of the famous painting The Scream.”
tuberculosis The Scream