Edvard Munch – Inheritance

Inheritance

Inheritance by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas from 1897, held under inventory number MM.M.00011 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 120 x 141 cm. The scene is a hospital waiting room: a woman in black mourning clothes sits on a bench with a naked infant across her lap.

The woman wears a dark blue-black hat with a stiff brim and a red ornament pinned to its right side. Her head is bowed forward and her face stays in the shadow of the brim. In her right hand she presses a large white handkerchief to her face, and a narrow gold bracelet catches the light at her wrist. Her outer garment is wide and almost black with a greenish cast, falling in heavy folds across her shoulders and upper arms.

The infant lies naked on a white cloth in her lap. The small body is pale yellowish white, with fine red blotches scattered over the chest and stomach. The head is too large for the body, the hair thin and light, the eyes wide, dark and open, the mouth slightly parted. One arm hangs down beside the mother’s knee and the legs are stretched apart.

The lower half of the canvas is taken up by a wide spreading skirt. Its colour is a pale sage green, and dark shapes that read as leaves or as moths are distributed evenly across the whole surface. The skirt pours over the bench and down towards the lower edge, where it ends against the brown boards of the floor.

Behind the woman a horizontal wooden bench runs across with a rail and upright legs in a warm brown. The wall behind her is dark, grey-green and bare. At the upper right hangs a white sheet with a bluish cast and illegible writing, and directly below it a brick-red rectangle; to their left is a smaller orange-yellow patch. The signature sits at the upper left.

The paint is dense and blended, without broken strokes. The transitions within the woman’s garment are soft and almost edgeless, while the contour of the child’s body is clear and hard, so that the white cloth and the pale skin tear away from the dark surroundings. The range of colour is closed: dark green, black and brown open only in the white of the handkerchief and in the red blotches. That restraint is what gives the scene its weight.

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 child’s skin, which has to stay translucent and ill at the same time; laid on too thickly, the scene loses its tension.

The format is upright and the scene dark and quiet, so this piece of wall art needs a calm wall and enough light for the face in the shadow of the brim to be read at all. It works well in a study, a library or a hallway, less well in a dining room. The ground should be light and neutral, because a dark wall swallows the scene. Hang it at eye level, with even and neutral lighting.

Ten sizes are offered from 40 x 45 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.