Edvard Munch – Dagny Juel Przybyszewska

Dagny Juel Przybyszewska

Dagny Juel Przybyszewska by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1893, held under inventory number MM.M.00212 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 100.5 x 149 cm and stands upright. A young woman stands at full length against a deep blue ground, turned towards the viewer.

The figure fills almost the whole height of the canvas. She stands a little left of centre, her arms hanging straight down, her hands lost in the dark of the skirt. Nothing supports or surrounds her: no floor, no wall, no furniture, only the blue.

The dress is dark and reaches the ground. It closes high at the throat, swells at the shoulders into the gathered sleeves of the 1890s, then narrows sharply at the waist before falling in one long unbroken mass. Its edges are drawn with single long strokes of near black, and those lines say more about the body than any modelling.

The head is the one finished passage. The hair is auburn, swept up and back from the forehead; the face is pale, laid in warm cream and pink, and it is the only warm colour anywhere on the canvas. The eyes are blue grey and look slightly past us. The mouth is small and red, and it is very faintly smiling.

Down the front of the skirt runs a paler violet panel, laid in short horizontal ridges of paint. It is the one place where the dark opens, and it draws the eye down the whole length of the figure.

The ground is not a flat plane but short strokes of blue, violet and grey that change direction constantly, so the surface moves without ever becoming a place. Above and behind the head a lighter arc curves through that field, brighter than anything around it, lifting the head out of the dark as a halo would.

The paint is thin throughout. In the ground and across the skirt the weave of the canvas shows through, and in places the colour is little more than a stain. Munch drew here as much as he painted, and the picture keeps the speed of that drawing.

The sitter was Dagny Juel, a Norwegian writer and pianist at the centre of the circle of artists and writers that gathered at the Zum schwarzen Ferkel tavern in Berlin. Munch painted her there in 1893, the year she married the Polish writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski. She was killed in Tbilisi in 1901, at thirty three.

The colour is reduced almost to a single note. Blue and violet cover nearly nine tenths of the surface, and the small warm area of the face carries the picture against them. With nowhere else to rest, the eye reads that face far brighter than it is.

The structure is one vertical held in a shallow, moving field: a tall dark column, answered by the curve of the arc behind the head and divided down the middle by the pale panel. Nothing else competes.

Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke, made to order and never printed. Because each canvas is painted for its own order, no two match down to the detail; the small differences in the paint are the mark of a hand rather than a flaw. In this motif the hardest passage is the face, which has to stay small, warm and calm while everything around it stays dark.

The format is tall and the range dark and quiet, so the work carries a narrow wall: beside a door, in a hall, between two windows. A pale, plain wall serves it best, since a strongly coloured ground closes the blue down. Hang it at eye level and light it evenly and rather warmly, because a cold lamp turns the ground grey.

Seven sizes are available from 40 x 60 cm up to 110 x 160 cm, along with a custom size, and every canvas can be ordered 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.