Edvard Munch – Jealousy

Jealousy

Jealousy by Edvard Munch is a painting of 1895, held under inventory number RMS.M.00242 by the Art Museums of Bergen (KODE). The original is oil on canvas and measures 100 x 67 cm. A large man’s head stares straight out at the viewer from the right foreground, and behind him a scene between a woman and another man plays out in a garden.

The man’s head and shoulders take the right third of the canvas. His hair is reddish brown, his moustache and short beard red-brown; his face is long and a pale greenish white, the eyes a pale grey-green and open in a fixed, hollow look. He is dressed in dark, almost black clothing that merges into the dark right edge. His face is the brightest thing in the whole painting.

Behind him and to the left is a garden. A woman stands frontally in a long red robe that hangs open at the front and leaves her pale body exposed from neck to thigh; her hair is long and a light reddish blonde. She reaches upward with one arm toward a branch. To her left a man in dark clothing stands in profile, reaching toward her. Above them is a tree with green foliage and small red fruits.

The background is made up of a dark green mass of foliage at the right, a strip of pale sky and a blue band in the upper left corner. At the far left runs a vertical ochre-orange plane, perhaps a wall or a doorpost, and beneath it a dark red and blue-green shape. The ground is dark green. The tree with red fruit and the offered reach are clear allusions to the garden of Eden, which gives the scene a second level of meaning.

The man in the foreground is commonly identified as the writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski, an acquaintance of Munch’s from the Berlin circle; the same man attached its present title to Munch’s Vampire. This is an identification repeated throughout the literature rather than a museum record. Munch treated the jealousy motif in several versions; our reproduction follows the Bergen one measuring 100 x 67 cm.

The paint is laid on thinly and in broad planes. The face in the foreground is the only part worked up in several layers with soft transitions; everything else is painted quickly, with the strokes left visible. The red robe is laid in a single sweep and remains the most saturated colour on the canvas. There are almost no contours, except where the dark clothing meets pale skin.

Ours is hand-painted wall art, made in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke, and never printed. Because each canvas is made specifically for the order, no two match down to the detail; the small differences in the paint are the mark of a hand rather than a flaw. With this motif the hardest passage is the pale greenish face, which must stay light without turning white, or it loses its sickly colour.

The scene is upright and has a strong division between the large face at the right and the garden at the left, so it needs some empty space around it. It works well in a study, a library or a hallway, where the viewer comes close and meets the stare. Because red and dark green are opposites, it wants a calm neutral wall – white, grey or sand – that repeats neither of them. Among famous paintings on canvas this one depends on even lighting; a strong beam from one side flattens the face.

Ten sizes are available along with a custom size, and every canvas can be ordered 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.