The Kristiania Bohéme, a circle of writers…

The Kristiania Bohéme, a circle of writers and artists in Kristiania (as Oslo is called at this time) is
an important factor in his artistic development of Edvard Munch.

Its members believe in free love and generally oppose bourgeois narrow-mindedness.

One of the older painters in the circle, Christian Krohg, gives Munch both instruction and encouragement.

Munch, born in 1863 into a middle-class Norwegian family, had shown a flair for drawing at an early age but received little formal training.

Not only did his father and brother die when he was still young, and another sister develop mental illness, but his mother died when he was five, his eldest sister when he was fourteen, both of tuberculosis.

Now twenty-two, Munch captures the last event in The Sick Child. (”Illness, insanity, and death,” as he will later say “were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle and accompanied me all my life.”)

He writes that his painting The Sick Child (1886), based on his sister's death, was his first "soul painting", his first break from Impressionism.