Edvard Munch "By the Death Bed", 1893

Edvard Munch "By the Death Bed", 1893

"Illness, madness and death were the black angels that watched over my cradle and have since followed me through life," Munch wrote in his notes, almost as an explanation for all the death-related motifs that were to form a large, significant part of his pictorial world.

The second half of the 19th century witnessed a turn in artistic thematics and mode of expression. With the advent of realism in the 1870s and 1880s, everyday life in society, along with its darker sides, were preferred to the more idealising depictions of people and landscapes of Romanticism. Source