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.

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 head of the dark-haired woman is depicted in profile and rests deeply with closed eyes in a white, puffy pillow.

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.

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.

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.

[4] A commenter stated on the painting that Munch created “devastating figures of expression that directly touch the viewer.

This piece of art is unsigned and undated,[3] is from a time around 1895 to 1898 and shows a daintily seated act of a girl next to several big, brightly coloured mask-like heads and gripping hands.

The piece of art that, according to museum curator Dorothee Hansen was “not a masterpiece”, possibly served as a supporting canvas for Death and the Child and was used this way due to a lack of material or because it did not meet the standards of the artist.

Both paintings were shown in 2011/2012 in the exhibition Edvard Munch – Rätsel hinter der Leinwand in Bremen.

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.

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.