Edvard Munch – Eye in Eye

Eye in Eye

Eye in Eye by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas from 1899, held under inventory number MM.M.00502 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 110 x 136 cm. The scene is simple and quiet: a man and a woman stand facing one another in a meadow, with the trunk of a tree rising between them.

The woman on the left is turned to the right. Her hair is long, thick and red-orange, falling over her shoulders and back almost to the lower edge of the canvas. Her face is small, pale and slightly raised, the lips narrow, the eyes dark and barely worked patches. Her dress is dark, almost black-blue, and scattered across it are pale oval marks that read as petals or as drops.

The man on the right is turned to the left. His hair is thick, dark blue and combed back, his face pale and yellow-green, as though no blood reached it. The nose and chin are sharply drawn, the eye dark and still. He wears a dark coat with a high white collar, the only bright plane in that half. His shoulders melt into the darkness behind him.

A tree grows between them. The trunk is pinkish brown with pale and reddish streaks, and at its middle sits a round yellow-green knot, placed exactly between the two faces. Higher up the trunk divides and passes into dark blue-green branches with small leaves that cover the upper edge of the scene.

The background falls into three bands. Below and in the middle is a dark green meadow without detail, rising towards the horizon. At the upper left stands a red house with a dark roof and four bright windows, small and set back. Above it runs a band of blue-green sky. At the right edge two red flowers grow on thin stems, the only notes of pure colour in the picture. The signature sits at the lower right.

The paint is thin and smoothly blended, with no thick loading. In places it is dragged so sparely that the canvas weave shows through; elsewhere it lies in soft, even planes. The transitions between the meadow and the figures have no hard edges, so the two seem grown into the landscape rather than placed in front of it. The range of colour is closed and cool: dark green, blue and black open only in the hair, the collar and the two red flowers.

The structure is exactly symmetrical, and that is its meaning. The faces sit at the same height and the tree stands between them as an upright barrier that separates them, although the title promises a meeting. Neither looks straight at the other; the two lines of sight cross somewhere in front of the trunk and fail to meet. The house at the upper left is the only sign of a world outside this pair.

The scene works the more strongly for what is left out. There is no gesture, no touch, no narrative to explain who they are. Munch left only posture, colour and distance, so the viewer decides whether this is a beginning or an ending.

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 fine art reproduction the hardest passage is the faces, which are small and pale and carry their weight on a handful of strokes; worked up too far, the scene turns into a portrait and loses its silence.

The format is upright and the scene dark and still, so this piece of wall art needs a calm surface and enough light for the red hair and the white collar to open at all. It works well in a bedroom, a study or a hallway, less well against strong wall colour. The ground should be light and neutral, because a dark wall swallows the green background. Hang it at eye level, in warm and even light.

Ten sizes are offered from 40 x 50 cm to 205 x 249 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.