Sister Inger

Sister Inger is an oil and canvas painting created in 1884 by Edvard Munch, a talented expressionist artist. The painting shows a woman dressed in an elegant black dress with her hands by her side. The dress can be seen to have some lace details on the hands and neck area from a close range.

The dress also has buttons for closures from the neck region to the waist area. Her hair is neatly part to the side, and the rest of it falling backward. Her face is seen, and her eyes seem to have focused elsewhere. They do not ideally face the viewer. This painting is of his younger sister, whom he loved so much. In this painting, she is seen to have a controlled yet guarded posture. Her thoughtful gaze looks introverted and could imply that she was in deep thought. The adoration for his sister is further seen when he repainted her in 1892. This time, she is in a beautiful black dress with some traces of brown. The long dress covers everywhere from her neck to her toes apart from her hand’s wrist area and a little circular opening on her throat area.

Her hands are folded to her front while her hair is parted at the centre. The painting has an ominous blue background, which she almost equals in height. Edvard was an expressionist painter who, from his paintings, lived a turbulent life. He had to stay out of school for most of his childhood during winter, as he was frequently unwell. As such, he had a lot of time to draw and perfect his painting enthusiasm. Even worse, he lost his mother to tuberculosis after the birth of his youngest sister. Nine years later, Munch lost his favourite sister due to tuberculosis. These are some of the life events that hugely disoriented his life. Edvard's father was a religious person.

He loved reading Edgar Allen Poe's ghost stories to Edvard and his two sisters. Together with his poor state of health, these stories gave Munch nightmares and paranoid visions of death. Later in life, he incorporated them into his paintings. In 1889, he also painted his sister on the beach. The painting is dubbed Inger on the Beach. His sister can be seen wearing a long white dress and holding a brown hat. She is sitting on one of the large beach rocks. The ocean is seen from afar from where she is sitting. His other famous artworks include Death in the Sickroom, The Scream, Anxiety, Ashes and The Kiss.