Edvard Munch – In the Cafe

In the Cafe

In the Cafe by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1890, held under inventory number MM.M.00251 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 49.5 x 59.5 cm and stands upright. Three figures fill the scene, caught in the middle of a conversation.

Left of centre a man stands with his back to us. He wears a long pale coat in sand and grey-brown and a black top hat, and his hands are raised in front of him as though he is holding something or has just spoken. Below the coat the dark trousers and black boots stand firmly on the floor.

To his right a woman stands in a long blue dress. She is seen from the side, turned towards him; the bodice is close-fitting and the skirt falls in wide folds to the floor. One hand rests on her hip, the other is held in front of her. Her hair is pinned up, and her face is warm and light in the middle of all that cool blue.

At the right edge there is a third figure: a man in a dark blue-grey jacket and a flat cap, leaning against a pale upright post. He has a moustache and looks towards the centre, towards the pair. Because of him the scene stops being a private conversation and becomes something watched.

The background is a broad field of warm light colour set down in short separate touches: cream, yellow, pink and mauve run through one another without ever blending. A darker olive-green band runs down behind the woman and reads as a door or a curtain, and it is that band which lifts her clear of the light around her.

At the lower left an orange-brown angular shape cuts into the scene and reads as the corner of a table or a bench. The floor is given as a soft pink-grey field with no drawn perspective; the room is made out of colour rather than out of lines.

The handling is small and separated here, and almost the whole surface is built from short parallel touches of the brush. This is Munch at the end of the 1880s, learning from French painting. The museum records the work as unsigned and dates it to 1890.

The colour rests on a single opposition: the woman’s cool blue dress in the middle of a warm sand and pink room. Because everything else is held back, the blue takes the eye at once, and the dark top hat gives it a second, heavier point to settle on.

The structure is simple and firm. Three upright figures stand side by side like columns, with bright gaps of background left between them. The eye travels down from the dark hat along the coat, across the gap to the blue dress, and on to the watcher at the edge.

Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke, made to order and never printed. Because each is painted for its own order, no two match down to the detail, and the small differences are the mark of a hand. The hardest passage here is the background, which has to stay alive as separate touches rather than settle into a flat plane.

The format is upright and the scene calm and sociable, so the painting suits a dining room, a coffee corner at home, or any room where people sit and talk. A quiet, pale wall serves it best, since the canvas carries its own colour. Hang it at eye level in even light.

Ten sizes are available from 40 x 50 cm up to 120 x 150 cm, along with a custom size, 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.