Edvard Munch – Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas from 1906, held under inventory number TG 292 by the Thiel Gallery (Thielska Galleriet) in Stockholm. The original measures 160 x 201 cm. The scene is an upright portrait of the philosopher set before a wide open landscape under a banded yellow sky.

Nietzsche stands to the right of centre, turned in three-quarter profile towards the left, and takes up the whole right half of the canvas. He leans slightly forward with his hands clasped in front of him on a low rail that runs across the lower part of the scene. He wears a dark blue-black coat, a white collared shirt and a dark tie.

The face is the most worked part of the picture. The forehead is high and furrowed, the brows heavy, the eyes shadowed and turned down. A large grey moustache spreads beneath the nose and falls across the mouth, almost hiding it. The hair is grey-blue and swept back. The skin is pale with blue and violet shadows; the face is not smoothly modelled but built from broad planes.

The sky fills the upper third and is painted in wide undulating bands of pale yellow, cream and mauve. The bands do not blend but run alongside one another from edge to edge. Munch used this same ribbon of sky in other works of the period; here it is bright rather than threatening.

Below the sky a valley spreads out in blue and green, with a river or road winding through it. Left of centre a small blue building with the outline of a tower stands on a rise, and at the far left a yellow tower rises. In the lower left corner a violet-brown diagonal of path or wall leads the eye up towards the figure. At the lower right are the painter’s signature and the word Weimar.

The paint is thin and broad. It is laid in large planes, in places so sparely that the weave of the canvas shows through. The contours are drawn with a blue line that stays visible and does not disappear under the colour. Nothing is smoothed: the picture is built from planes and lines, not from transitions.

The structure rests on three directions working against each other: the upright of the figure at the right, the horizontal bands of sky, and the diagonal of the valley. The philosopher stands at the edge of that landscape rather than in it; the rail in front separates him from the space opening behind. The portrait is therefore not a scene of encounter but the image of a man looking down while a world opens at his back.

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 face, which is built from a few broad planes; softened too far, the portrait loses its edge and becomes merely an old gentleman with a moustache.

The format is upright and large and the scene bright, so this piece of wall art needs a tall wall and some distance for the landscape behind the figure to open at all. It works well in a study, a library or an office, less well in a bedroom. The wall should be calm and light; the yellow sky washes out against a warm ground. Hang it at eye level, with even and neutral 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.