3-051-654 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Sick Girl, 1881. Additional Info: Christian Krohg’s Sick Girl has often been interpreted as a socially polemical painting, portraying the dark underbelly of modern industrial society. We are confronted with a brutal reality, but the girl herself expresses no sorrow or despair. Krohg adhered to the ideals of realistic painting and rarely used symbols, but in this case the withering rose in the girl’s lap is an unmistakable emblem of transience. We do not know who sat for Krohg’s painting, but there is reason to believe that the memory of his sister Nana’s illness and death in 1868 was a crucial backdrop. Krohg suffered the same fate as Edvard Munch in that he lost both a sister and his mother at a young age, and Krohg’s Sick Girl may well have been a source of inspiration for Munch’s The Sick Child (1886).