Edvard Munch – Despair

Despair

Despair by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas from 1894, held under inventory number MM.M.00513 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 72.5 x 92 cm. The scene is a bridge above a fjord at sunset: a bowed male figure stands in the foreground and behind him rises a band of fiery red sky.

The man is placed in the lower right half of the canvas and takes up nearly its whole height. He wears a dark coat and a dark hat with a stiff brim. His head is bent forward and a little to one side, and his face is pale, yellow-green, with deep dark shadows around the eyes. The body is painted as an almost uniform dark plane without detail, so that the face remains the only bright part of the figure.

The bridge rail runs from the lower right corner on a steep diagonal up towards the left. It is painted in red-brown, and beneath it the walkway shows in grey-violet and blue strokes. The diagonal is strong and empty; nothing interrupts it.

At the upper left two small dark figures walk away along the bridge, turned from the viewer. One wears a tall hat. They are painted as silhouettes only and draw no attention at all; it is precisely their facelessness that sharpens the solitude of the figure in front.

Beyond the bridge the fjord spreads out in broad undulating bands of grey-blue and dark blue. Small ships and the outline of a shore with pale buildings can just be made out in it. The upper third of the canvas is sky: horizontal bands of red, orange, yellow and green-blue laid one above another.

The paint is thin and drawn out. The sky is made of long horizontal strokes that do not blend but stay separate from one another, so the colours do not pass into each other but collide. The figure, by contrast, is painted flat and dense. That opposition between a restless sky and a motionless figure carries the whole feeling of the scene.

The structure is built from three directions that work against each other: the upright of the figure, the steep diagonal of the bridge, and the horizontal bands of sky and water. None of them wins. The eye slides along the diagonal into depth, the bands of sky return it, and the figure stands unmoving at the crossing. That is why the scene feels restless despite the quiet pose.

Our version is hand-painted in oils on canvas, stroke by stroke, and is never printed. Because every canvas is made individually to order, no two match down to the last detail; small differences in the paint are the mark of a human hand and not a fault. In this piece of hand-painted canvas art the hardest passage is the sky, whose bands must stay separate; blurred into one another the sky becomes a haze and the scene loses its tension.

The format is upright, the lower half dark and the upper strongly coloured, so the picture needs a calm, light wall. It works well in a study, a library or a hallway, less well above a sofa in a room of strong colour. Because the subject is concentrated and without detail, it also carries close viewing and a smaller room. Hang it at eye level, with even and neutral light.

Seven sizes are offered from 40 x 50 cm to 120 x 150 cm, along with a custom size; every canvas can be ordered framed or unframed. This oil on canvas reproduction and 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.