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Munch spent much of 1885-86 working on a single painting, The Sick Child. It depicts a teenaged girl propped up against a pillow in a large armchair, next to an older woman who bows her head in despair and grief. Grounded in Munch's recollections of his sister's death ten years earlier, in accordance with Jaeger's dictum of the primacy of personal experience, and possibly influenced by the contemporary success of thematically similar paintings in Scandinavia and Central Europe, The Sick Child was conceived in a variation of Impressionist technique. In the course of a year-long alteration, Munch built up thick coagulations of paint into which the final remaining image was more scratched than painted, and over which a veil of thin rivulets of paint was placed (to be removed during a partial repainting c. 1893).
In his experimentation, Munch created effects similar to those achieved in the late 1880s by James Ensor and Vincent van Gogh in works today recognized as precursors of 20th-century Expressionism. In Norway in 1886, however, there was no measure by which The Sick Child could be judged. Exhibited at the 1886 Høstutstilling in Kristiania as A Study, the painting was vehemently attacked by critics and fellow artists alike, so that only Hans Jaeger in the newspaper Dagen dared to defend it, describing it as an intuitive work of genius. Today the work is considered to mark Munch's breakthrough, it was here that he demonstrated the independence and willingness to break fresh ground.
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