The great Swedish playwright August Strindberg once described Edvard Munch (1863–1944) as 'the painter of love, of jealousy, of death, and of sadness'. Here 'love' is outnumbered by darker concerns, and in Munch's art, love itself is not a straightforward matter. We see love assailed by tragedy, disturbed by sexuality and tormented by jealousy, in images of distilled, expressive power.

Has a painter made mortal illness their theme so persistently as Munch? With good reason: tuberculosis (so prevalent in his native Norway that it was known as the 'national illness') killed his mother and sister Sophie before he reached adulthood. Munch himself, frequently unwell throughout his life, almost succumbed to the disease as a youth. The oppressive piety of his father in praying for his son's recovery left Munch feeling guilty at having contracted the disease, and in God's debt at having survived.

Later, Munch blamed his father for passing on what he called 'the seeds of madness', which we might identify more exactly as profound guilt and anxiety stoked by the strictures of religion.

Munch was born in Løten, some 170 kilometres north of Christiania, as Oslo was then called. His father, a military doctor and a fearsome figure, was a torturing presence who haunted Munch throughout his life. At the age of 17, Munch declared he would become an artist, despite his father's damning disapproval.

In 1885 he made the first version of a piece he declared his breakthrough work and the origin of much of his art. This was The Sick Child, a harrowing depiction of 15-year-old sister Sophie's final moments, the 1907 version of which (in Tate Modern) is the only oil painting by Munch in a UK public collection.

In excited anticipation of making The Sick Child, Munch told a friend: 'Perhaps some other painter can depict chamber pots under a bed better than I can. But put a sensitive, suffering young girl into the bed, a girl consumptively beautiful with blue-white skin turning yellow in the blue shadows – and her hands! Can't you imagine them? Yes, that would be a real accomplishment...'. Illness was such a presence in his life that it had become the subject he most eagerly wished to capture.

Munch gave a moving account of Sophie's final hours. She had asked to sit up, so they moved her to a wicker chair. We can see the top of the chair above the large white pillow. Her face, in profile, seems to yearn for the air and light of the open window. Or perhaps she seeks to console her distraught Aunt Karen. As the critic Poul Erik Tøjner argues, the painting is about the abandonment of the living by the dead: 'The child is already on her way into some kind of transfiguring light that nobody can explain.'

1907, oil on canvas by Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

The painting outraged its audience due to its apparently unfinished state and Munch's technique of scoring the surface of the heavily applied paint, as well as adding streaks of green which, in Reinhold Heller's description, 'run down the surface to form an eyelash-like veil through which the dematerialised memory image could be seen'.

'I don't paint what I see, I paint what I saw', is one of Munch's most famous pronouncements – what Munch 'saw' was his experience of his sister's last moments, which he captured eight years after the event. Regarded as an early Expressionist masterpiece, The Sick Child is a remembered evocation of emotion, where expression matters more than naturalism. The act of painting is detached from the moment of the subject to liberate the artist's response.

To provide a staging for The Sick Child – a physical tableau – Munch used a girl called Betzy Nielsen as his model: her bloodless pallor and red hair struck him as a powerful incarnation of Sophie.

Betzy sat for another work which has a pivotal place in Munch's development. If The Sick Child represented a new beginning in his art, Spring (1889) seems to have been his last attempt at the use of an Impressionist technique to present a Naturalistic scene. It represents an updated version of The Sick Child but in a much more conservative, accessible style. Low on confidence, Munch deliberately made a painting that he thought would be well received. Once again, the light and fresh air from the window represent life in the face of death. This is the light the Nordic people wait for and treasure. As Munch wrote: 'I, and all those I loved, beginning with my mother, sat winter after winter in that chair longing for the sun until death took them away'.

Munch considered his recovery from tuberculosis at the age of 13 the event that set the course of his life. In his journal, written in the third person, he writes how 'He was saved... but his vitality was broken'. 'Art', he wrote, 'became his sole aim', and became a shield, a salve, with which to face his fears. When meeting strangers, he sometimes felt uncomfortable unless he painted them, and even illness could be countered by art: 'When I transform sickness into a painting, like The Sick Child, it is on the contrary a healthy expression. It represents my health.'

He rejected the idea of marriage for fear of passing on his 'madness' to others, and he thought that a committed relationship with a woman would hinder his work. Despite his obvious fascination with women – who feature so prominently in his art – they remained a source of torment and unease.

The vivacious Dagny Juel was one of many women who featured briefly in his life. She became Munch's model and probably his lover. As the object of interest of many men, jealousies abounded, and Munch's response was to depict himself as the cause of jealousy. In Jealousy II, Munch converses with the near-naked Dagny, while his friend Staczu Przybyszewski is cast as the face of tormented envy. Here Munch employs a characteristic compositional trope – Przybyszewski (who later married Dagny) is positioned in the near foreground and stares out at us, as if seeking explanation or reassurance.

Dagny inspired some of Munch's most important works, including Madonna and Vampyr. She is described by his biographer Sue Prideaux as 'the one woman in whom Munch forgave everything, the only one who made the transition from sensual goddess to mother and saint'. Here Prideaux refers to the extremes of Munch's portrayals of women. A psychiatric study from 1980 suggests Munch had narcissistic personality disorder due to the traumas of his early life, which meant he was unable to achieve 'constancy and love'. Whatever the cause, women became archetypes of good and evil – angels or fiends.

While it was fashionable to depict women as seductive sirens in late nineteenth-century art and literature, in the view of the psychiatrist Harold W. Wylie, 'had the times not provided the concept of the femme fatale, [Munch] would have created an equivalent symbol to meet his own needs'.

Vampyr II is a print made after the original 1893 painting. Given the title Love and Pain by Munch, the image began as 'simply a woman kissing a man on the nape of the neck' (in Munch's words), and with that title, we might see it as a moment of tenderness or consolation. But the work was renamed Vampyr by Przybyszewski, making it a disturbing image of predatory sensuality – and it is true that the woman's apparent nakedness and coiling red hair suggest passion rather than compassion.

Munch's women often possess long, flowing hair, as an assertion of their sexuality. Like the woman in Vampyr, the smiling sleepy-eyed girl in the print known as Peasant Girl (Bondepike) has a mane of thick hair, and there's Munchian ambiguity in her girlish yet seemingly lascivious expression.

Like Munch, the poet Charles Baudelaire characterised women as angels or sirens. The Urn was made as an illustration for Baudelaire's collection Les Fleurs du mal, of which several poems were inspired by his muse, Jeanne Duval. The parallels with Munch are uncanny – poems to Jeanne hymn her luxuriant hair and address her as a vampire.

In Munch's lithograph, the head of a serious-looking woman emerges from a flaming urn, phoenix-like, below which two naked women sprawl and a third appears contemplative but wears a wicked smile, what Munch called 'the terrible grimace of evil'. They seem to represent licentiousness, dissolution, with the emerging phoenix-woman their redemption.

Munch's conflicted view of women saw them portrayed as victims as well as tormentors. In Desire (Begier), three monstrous men bear down on the naked body of a young woman. The image is all the more disturbing because the woman appears to be sleeping or dead. And in The Hands, a mass of male hands reach out to grope a half-clothed woman (the model for whom was Dagny). The desirous men who menace these women are perhaps an expression of Munch's shame at his own lustful feelings towards those he idealised.

Martha 'Tupsy' Jebe was far from a femme fatale. She was, according to Sue Prideaux, 'as sunny and as merrily inconsequential as her nickname'. Seven years younger than Munch, and 'among the white-clad innocents in the seraglio of Munch's loves', she had a brief fling with Munch when they were art students in Paris.

Munch and Tupsy made drawings of each other on the same copper plate – sketches which seem to reveal Munch's distance and awkwardness. Tupsy is shown lying back and smiling up at him, presumably in bed, while she portrays Munch in pensive profile, fully clothed and smoking.

The composer Frederick Delius, a friend of Munch's and a student at the same art school, found love came more easily. While Tupsy was soon history, Delius married his art school girlfriend, and they became lifelong companions.

For Munch, true innocence remained in the memory of his sister Sophie. He never recovered from her death. Her life was taken by the same illness that he survived, leaving a guilt that the religious reproofs of his childhood only compounded. He kept the wicker chair in which she died and remade The Sick Child many times. A photograph shows the elderly Munch surrounded by his paintings (as he liked to be), his final 1927 rendition behind him.

Munch saw continuity from The Sick Child through to the various versions of The Sun painted between 1910 and 1913, the largest of which he made for the ceremonial hall at the University of Oslo.

This, he said, 'was Osvald's sun', a reference to the play Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen, who Munch knew and portrayed in a lithograph. The play concerns Osvald's inheritance of syphilis, and Munch identified his own family history with Ghosts – in a sketch for a stage set interior, he included furniture and family portraits from his own childhood home.

Ibsen in the Café of the Grand Hotel, Christiania

Ghosts: Stage Set Interior (Gjengangere: Sceneinteriør)

At the end of the play, as day is breaking, the dying, syphilitic Osvald asks his mother for the sun: the rising, life-giving sun. It is the same sun, long-awaited in Munch's and Ibsen's northern land, but powerless to heal Osvald and sister Sophie.

For Munch, the trials that beset his life were a requirement for his art: 'Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder... My sufferings are part of myself and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art'. We are grateful that his sufferings did not destroy Munch himself before he left us his works of extraordinary emotional power.

Adam Wattam, writer

Further reading

Reinhold Heller, Munch: His Life and Work, John Murray, 1984

Gill Holland (ed.), The Private Journals of Edvard Munch: We Are Flames which Pour out of the Earth, University of Wisconsin Press, 2005

Sue Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream, Yale University Press, 2005

Poul Erik Tøjner, Munch: In His Own Words, Prestel, 2001

Harold W. Wylie, 'Edvard Munch', American Imago, vol. 37, no. 4, 1980, pp. 413–43

Artworks

Landschaft – Norwegian Landscape 1908
Edvard Munch (1863–1944) and Paul Cassirer (1871–1926)
The Sick Child (Det syke barn) 1907
Edvard Munch (1863–1944)
The Beguiling of Merlin 1874–1877
Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898)
The Urn 1896
Edvard Munch (1863–1944)
Frederick Delius c.1922
Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Anxiety and illness in the art of Edvard Munch

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