This is the first comprehensive scholarly and critical account of the relation between the two great Norwegian modernists Edvard Munch and Henrik Ibsen. Drawing on Norwegian social and cultural history, Munch's extensive unpublished writings, and the interlocking careers of Munch and Ibsen, Joan Templeton demonstrates Ibsen's primordial importance for Munch as a pioneering modernist voice. Munch made more than 400 illustrations of Ibsen's plays, one of the greatest homages a painter ever made to a writer. In addition to locating these illustrations in Munch's life and work as a whole, Templeton also studies them as depictions of Ibsen's plays.