When you look at Munch’s life from the outside, it’s tempting – perhaps far too tempting – to read his art biographically: take, for example, the loss of his mother when he was five, and of his sister Sophie when he was fourteen, both of them dead from tuberculosis. Eight years after his sister’s death, he painted The Sick Child. Here the dying girl sits with the family’s carer, Aunt Karen, by her side. Munch would return to that motif again and again.