“Painted in a Symbolist style, with lines, colors and figural distortion to reveal the seascape through the prism of sadness and jealousy, Melancholy is part of a series of similar paintings and woodcuts that Munch completed in the 1890s. The artwork shows a man brooding in the foreground, succumbed to sadness, with his body turned away from the scene that is causing him pain: a man and a woman who are standing on a jetty, in the background, about to embark on a boat. The couple may physically be there, on the pier, but the expressiveness of the painting seems to make no distinction between imagination and reality. Whether the man is simply imagining the two lovers going away or he is acutely aware that they’re nearby, is of no consequence. The pain he is feeling is just as real.”
https://artschaft.com/2018/02/15/edvard-munch-melancholy-1894-1896/