Edvard Munch – Around the Drinking Table

Around the Drinking Table

Around the Drinking Table by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on wooden panel of 1926–1930, held under inventory number MM.M.00123 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 60.5 x 48.5 cm and lies across. A company has gathered around a table set with glasses and a bottle.

At the front, in the middle, stands a dark bottle painted as an almost black upright cylinder. It is the darkest object in the work and acts as the axis around which everything else arranges itself. Beside it stand tall glasses of an orange drink and a low tumbler, all given in a few quick drags.

The table is covered with a whitish cloth that spreads into a light plane across the lower half. That light is the only large quiet surface in an otherwise busy scene, and it gives the eye somewhere to rest.

Behind the table sit three principal faces. At the left a figure in dark clothes leans forward, the face reddish with a yellowish cheek. At the centre sits a broad man in a black jacket with a white collar and a bow tie; his is the reddest and roundest face in the work. To his right is a figure in a green coat and a dark cap.

Further back a crowd presses in, given only as ovals of faces and green planes of bodies. None of them is worked up; they are a crowd rather than individuals, and that is exactly why the scene feels full and loud although it is painted with very little detail.

At the right edge one more figure sits turned aside, with an ochre-yellow face and hands on the table. Above, at the centre, pale violet and white vertical stripes run down, reading as a curtain or a lit wall.

Green governs the colour. Green is in the walls, in the coats, in the shadows of the faces and even in the cloth, and the red and ochre faces rise out of it as warm signals. The orange drink in the glasses repeats that warmth in miniature and ties the lower half of the work to the upper.

The handling is broad, quick and uncorrected. Munch builds a face with a few drags and then leaves it; the eyes are often only dark dots, the mouth a single stroke. In places the paint is thin enough for the wooden panel to show through.

The museum records the work as unsigned and dates it between 1926 and 1930. Munch painted company at a table all his life, from the early suppers in the family house to these later, louder gatherings; here the emphasis falls on the group rather than on any one person.

The structure rests on a triangle: the dark bottle at the front centre, and two groups of faces spreading up and away from it to left and right. The eye stops first at the bottle because it is the darkest, then travels up the bright cloth to the red faces.

Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke, made to order and never printed. Said plainly: the original is on a wooden panel, while our reproduction is painted on canvas, the usual support for a hand-painted work of this kind. The hardest passage here is the faces, which must stay alive although they are painted with very few strokes.

The format lies across and the scene is sociable and warm, so the painting sits best in a dining room, a kitchen, or any room where people gather. A quiet, pale wall serves it best, since the green and red carry all the emphasis themselves. Hang it at eye level in warmer light.

Nine sizes are available from 50 x 40 cm up to 231 x 180 cm, along with a custom size, framed or unframed. More of the artist is in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and painting on the Edvard Munch blog.