The group’s spokesman and anarchist writer, Hans Jaeger, preached an anti-bourgeois lifestyle of freedom and sexual liberation, social equality, and the rejection of Christianity. This encouraged a fundamentally subjective and introspective quality to the art of the time.

In accodance with Jaeger’s dictum of working from personal experience, The Sick Child represents a variation of Impressionist technique. In the lengthy alterations, Munch built up coagulations of paint into which the actual image was more scratched than painted and over which a veil of paint was placed and removed during a partial repainting. This experimation created effects similar to those of James Ensor and Vincent van Gogh in the late 1880s, and are recognized as precursors of 20th Century Expressionism.

Nevertheless, 1886 Norway was unappreciative of the work, and his showing at the 1886 Høstutstilling exhibition was attacked by both critics and fellow artists. Only Jaeger and the newspaper Dagen came to Munch’s defense, calling it the intuitive work of a genius.

While in Norway, Munch began an affair with Emily “Millie” Ihlen Thaulow, the wife of Fritz Thaulow’s brother, Carl. He also began to express himself in writing, setting forth an autobiographical journal which served as a reference for the majority of his paintings in the early 1890s. During this period, Jaeger was involved in a love affair with Krohg’s wife; and undoubtedly this and Munch’s own numerous affairs intensified his emotional expressions of women, love and death.

Munch held a one-man exhibition of his works at the Studentersamfund, Kristiania in April and May of 1889. This was his first substantial showing, held at the Student Organization in Kristiania. This was an event unprecedented in Norway aside from a celebration of the respected academic landscape painter Hans Fredrik Gude. In place of The Sick Child, Munch substituted Spring, a massive new painting on the same theme, painted in a more conservative and Naturalist style.

Despite the controversy surrounding him, the collection received a favorable review from Christian Krohg. This led to an award of a three-year grant, contingent upon study with a drawing tutor. In 1889 Munch spent his first summer at the Norway resort Åsgårdstrand on Kristianiafjord (now Oslofjord), the retreat to which he consistently returned and which for 20 years provided the setting for innumerable paintings.

That autumn, Munch returned to Paris, where he studied under Léon Bonnet. Although Munch had briefly visited exhibition in Antwerp and Paris in 1885, it was the Exposition Universelle of 1889 and other Paris art exhibitions where Munch absorbed extensive examples of contemporary paintings.

Less than a year after his return to Paris, Munch relocated to St. Cloud, where he continued writing and painting. Shortly thereafter, word of the unexpected death of his father caused yet another spiritual and emotional crisis in Munch, causing him to reject Jaeger’s anti-Christian teachings. His expression of emotion through art reached a new pinnacle in the spring of 1890, with two of Munch’s most important works, Night in St. Cloud, a memorial to his father, and Spring Day on Karl Johan Street, a sunny view of people promenading on Kristiania’s main thoroughfare in spring. Adapting principles of Neo-Impressionism, the two images contrast representations of death and grief, then life and joy.