Letter to Skredsvig 

Theodor Severin Kittelsen made this pen and ink drawing for a letter to a friend, the painter Christian Skredsvig. Kittelsen, a Norwegian artist, is known for his illustrations of fairy tales and legends, often featuring trolls and other mythical creatures. In this drawing he offers us an amusing, if unflattering, portrait of ordinary people. We see a man and a woman, perhaps a married couple, greedily devouring food from a large pot. The exaggerated features and somewhat grotesque depiction of the figures suggest a critique of bourgeois society and its obsession with material comforts. Is Kittelsen suggesting that these people are so consumed by their appetites that they have lost their humanity? To fully understand the social commentary in this work, scholars can research the cultural context of Norway in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the history of social critique in visual culture. What emerges is a vision of art as intimately connected to its society.