Edvard Munch – Lucien Dedichen and Jappe Nilssen

Lucien Dedichen and Jappe Nilssen

Lucien Dedichen and Jappe Nilssen by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1925–1926, held under inventory number MM.M.00370 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 134.5 x 159.5 cm and stands upright. It is a double portrait: one man stands, the other sits, both in the same room.

Lucien Dedichen stands at the left, seen at full length and slightly from the side, in a dark blue-violet suit that separates from its surroundings only by being cooler. The head is bald with a fringe of hair above the ears, the face long and serious, the eyes turned down towards the seated man. His arms hang at his sides, one hand pushed against the hip.

Jappe Nilssen sits at the right in a broad armchair with an ochre-yellow frame. He leans back, head turned to the left and seen almost in profile; the hair dark and combed back, the brows heavy, the mouth open and red. That open mouth is the event of the picture: one man is talking, the other listening.

Between them stands a round green table with a shallow dish of oranges and a pink-red book beside it. It is the only warm, saturated colour in the lower half of the canvas, and it ties the two figures into one scene.

The wall behind is a pale grey-green, thinly painted, and three framed sheets hang on it: a larger dark rectangle above centre and two smaller below. A dark doorway opens at the left; at the right a lighter panel carries an irregular ochre patch, as though a lamp fell on it.

The floor is green and blue-green in broad horizontal strokes, with a violet patch in the lower left corner and the standing man’s dark shoes beside it. The room is assembled from planes rather than measured in perspective.

The paint is thin and quick. On the wall the weave of the canvas shows through; elsewhere the colour is pulled in long open strokes that never merge. The faces and hands are worked further than anything else, while the suits stay closed dark planes with a few lighter drags. The signature is in the upper right corner.

Both sitters came from Munch’s own circle: Jappe Nilssen was a Norwegian art critic and writer and a friend of the painter for many years, Lucien Dedichen a physician. This is not a commissioned likeness of strangers but a scene between acquaintances, caught mid-conversation.

The range is cool and greenish, with ochre-yellow in the chair and table and warm flesh in the faces. Because everything else is held back, the heads come forward though painted no lighter than the wall.

The structure rests on the vertical of the standing figure against the horizontal of the seated one, with the little table between them joining rather than dividing. The eye travels from the bald head down the dark suit, across the oranges, and up to the open mouth at the right.

Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke, made to order and never printed. Because each canvas is painted for its own order, no two match down to the detail; the small differences in the paint are the mark of a hand rather than a flaw. In this motif the hardest passages are the two faces, which must stay alive against the large dark planes of the suits.

The format is upright and the scene quiet, so the painting suits a study, a library or a waiting room: anywhere people sit and talk. A pale, plain wall serves it best, since a strongly coloured one closes down the green room on the canvas. Hang it at eye level in even, rather warm light, which leaves the faces their warmth.

Ten sizes are available from 50 x 60 cm up to 135 x 160 cm, very close to the original, 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.