Edvard Munch – Galloping Horse

Galloping Horse

Galloping Horse by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas from 1912, held under inventory number MM.M.00541 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 110.5 x 135.5 cm. The scene is a snow-covered road in winter, along which a harnessed horse comes galloping straight towards the viewer.

The horse fills the middle of the canvas and is painted so that it seems about to step out of it. The coat is brown shot through with orange and reddish streaks, the mane a dark tangled brown, the muzzle thrust forward and down. The eye is wide and rimmed with white, the nostrils flared. A blue-green collar sits around the neck and chest, and the grey-violet shafts of the harness run back out of the picture on either flank.

The legs are caught mid-stride: the forelegs stretched apart, the hind legs pushing off, the hooves dark and blurred as though moving too fast for the eye. Beneath them the snow is churned into blue, grey and violet tracks.

Three figures stand at the left edge. The first is a man in a dark blue coat and blue hat with a reddish face, behind him a paler figure in cream, and further back a dark figure in blue and black with the arms held out. At the right stands a smaller figure in a violet coat with dark hair, and behind it rises a blue-green slope with dark trees. Higher up a small building with a red roof shows among the snow, and above that run tracks and a pole beside the road. The signature is at the upper right.

The paint is thick, worked wet into wet and openly gestural. In places it stands proud of the canvas; elsewhere it is dragged with a broad brush into long bands. The snow is not white: it is built from blue, lilac, grey and cream strokes that only become snow at a distance. That roughness is what gives the scene its speed.

The structure is simple and forceful. The horse forms a dark upright in the middle of a bright field, flanked by two groups of small figures, neither of which competes with it. The diagonal of the road runs from the upper left towards the lower right and gives the scene its direction, while the dark slope at the right closes the composition so the eye stays with the horse.

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 snow, which has to stay built from visible strokes of colour; smoothed into whiteness, the scene loses all of its speed.

The format is upright and the scene bright and full of movement, so it carries a smaller room and needs little distance. It works well in a living room, a hallway or a child’s room, because the subject reads at once. The wall should be calm and light; a strongly patterned ground fights the snow. Hang it at eye level, with even light so the blues in the snow do not go grey.

Ten sizes are offered from 40 x 50 cm to 205 x 249 cm, among them the original size of 110 x 135 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.