Edvard Munch – Evening on Karl Johan

Evening on Karl Johan

Evening on Karl Johan by Edvard Munch is a painting of 1892, held under inventory number RMS.M.00245 by the Art Museums of Bergen (KODE), in the Rasmus Meyer Collection. The original is oil on canvas and measures 121 x 84.5 cm. A crowd of townspeople advances toward the viewer along the main street of what was then Kristiania, while the roadway at the right stays empty.

The left side is taken by a row of tall houses in a pale pinkish ochre, receding into depth in steep perspective; warm yellow light burns in several of the windows. At the right a wide and empty roadway runs in grey-green, and beyond it stands a lower dark building with a row of bright yellow windows. Further right a large dark green-black mass of tree rises. The sky is a deep blue-grey, the sky of evening.

In the foreground and left of centre the crowd comes straight at us and fills the whole lower left of the canvas. The faces are pale yellowish white and mask-like, the eyes large, dark and staring, the mouths barely there. The men wear tall black top hats; a large pale yellow hat stands out at the centre, and in the lower left corner a wide cream and red brim carries red flowers. At the front right a woman in a dark dress and broad hat, with a reddish-orange brooch at her throat, looks straight out. The bodies merge at the bottom into one dark mass and no feet are visible.

Right of centre, alone on the empty road, a single dark figure walks away from us. That small reversal is the heart of the painting: the crowd moves toward the viewer and one person moves the other way. Munch developed the scene further in Anxiety, where he set the same crowd beneath the burning sky above the fjord. Our reproduction follows the Bergen version measuring 121 x 84.5 cm.

The paint is laid on thinly and dryly, in places almost rubbed into the canvas, so that the weave shows through the sky and the road. The faces are made with a few strokes and no drawing beneath them; the eyes are often just two dark dots. The perspective of the houses is emphatic and slightly exaggerated, which pushes the crowd forward toward the edge of the picture.

Ours is a museum-quality reproduction, hand-painted in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke, and never printed. Because each canvas is made specifically for the order, no two match down to the detail; the small differences in the paint are the mark of a hand rather than a flaw. With this motif the hardest thing is holding the difference between the pale faces and the dark mass of bodies, since too heavy a loading merges the faces into one plane.

As a fine art reproduction this is one of the few Munch paintings that works well in a shared room: the format is horizontal, the scene is narrative and the colours are restrained. Hang it on a longer wall where it has some empty space at either side, for instance above a dining table or in a hall. Because the sky is blue-grey it suits a warm wall – sand, oatmeal or pale timber – which does not extinguish the yellow of the window light. The light should be warm; cold lighting takes the evening character out of the scene.

Ten sizes are available 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.