Edvard Munch – Bathing Women

Bathing Women

Bathing Women by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas made between 1896 and 1898, held under inventory number MM.M.00270 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 146 x 100.5 cm. The scene is horizontal and shows two naked women in green water.

The figure on the right stands and wades through the shallows. We see her from behind, upright, from the thighs up; the body is painted in a warm yellowish pink flesh that separates sharply from the cool ground. The head is tilted forward and down, the hair dark brown and gathered into a smooth mass.

The figure on the left lies horizontally in the water. She is painted in a pale greenish white, as though the water were already covering her, and her shoulders and back reach towards the left edge. Her hair is chestnut and falls downward; the face is turned away and cannot be seen.

An empty band of water is left between the two. That gap carries the scene: the women do not touch, do not look at one another and are not in conversation, but are set side by side like two states of the same body, upright and lying down.

The water is painted as a grid of rectangles in dark green, blue-green and grey-green. The fields do not blend but stand next to one another like tiles, and in places are edged with a darker stroke. The surface is therefore neither transparent nor reflective; it reads as a solid, assembled plane.

In the upper left corner sits a reddish orange disc. It is painted thickly and without an outline and is the only warm accent in the upper half of the canvas. It reads as a sun or as its reflection on the water; the painter does not explain it.

Below the disc a pale greenish white trail winds across the water, curving from the left edge towards the centre. That stroke ties the disc to the lying figure and is the only genuinely flowing shape in an otherwise divided ground.

The paint is thin and calm. Colour is laid in broad areas, without heavy impasto and without detail; faces, fingers and features are not worked up. In places the weave of the canvas shows through, but the canvas is almost entirely covered.

The colour scale is cool and restrained. Greens and blue-greens take most of the surface, and the warm flesh of the two figures is the only thing that steps out of it. It is that restraint that makes the bodies seem to glow, although they are not painted any lighter than their surroundings.

The motif belongs among the bathers the painter made by the sea at Aasgaardstrand, where he spent his summers. It is not a portrait and not a scene from daily life; the two figures have no names and no story, and are set down as shapes in water.

The structure rests on the contrast between the vertical of the standing figure and the horizontal of the lying one. The grid of the ground holds both in place and allows them no depth, so the scene stays flat and decorative. The eye travels from the red disc along the white trail to the lying figure, then across the empty water to the standing one.

Our version is hand painted in oils on canvas, stroke by stroke, and is never printed. Because every canvas is made to order, no two match in every detail; small differences are the mark of a human hand, not a fault. The hardest passage here is the grid of the water, which must stay distinct and must not settle into an even plane.

The format is horizontal and the colours cool and quiet, so the painting works well in a bathroom, a bedroom or a light living room. Keep the wall behind it light and neutral; against a green or blue wall the ground merges with the wall. Hang it at eye level in even light without hard reflections.

Nine sizes are offered, from 60 x 40 cm to 160 x 105 cm, along with a custom size; every canvas can be ordered framed or unframed. More of the painter’s work is in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and work on the Edvard Munch blog.