Love and Pain (The Vampire) (by Edvard Munch) Stone Coaster

This design is taken from a sketch for a painting by Edvard Munch titled "Love and Pain" (1893), which also became known as "Vampire". The painting shows a woman with long flame-red hair kissing a man on the neck, as the couple embrace. Although others have seen in it "a man locked in a vampire's tortured embrace – her molten-red hair running along his soft bare skin", Munch himself always claimed it showed nothing more than "just a woman kissing a man on the neck". The painting was first called Vampire by Munch's friend, the critic Stanisław Przybyszewski, who saw the painting on its first exhibition and described it as "a man who has become submissive, and on his neck a biting vampire's face".