Edvard Munch – Night in Nice

Night in Nice

Night in Nice by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1891, held under inventory number NG.M.00394 by the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 54 x 48 cm and stands upright. The scene looks down from above on a Mediterranean town at night: pale flat-fronted houses step down the slope, and a broad sky stretches above them.

The houses are given as flat bright planes with dark roofs, without ornament and without drawn architecture; the windows are no more than dark patches. Dark cypresses and shrubs grow between them and provide the only verticals in the lower half. A dark ridge of hills lies across the middle and separates the town from the sky. The sky takes the whole upper third and is worked in visible strokes that run horizontally and never merge. At the front right the ground falls away into a dark slope, which closes the scene and places the viewer above the town rather than in it. There is not a single figure. The scene is built from three bands – roofs, ridge and sky – set one above the other without perspective; the depth is carried only by the difference in darkness.

Munch spent the winter of 1891 on the French Riviera, where he had gone for his health and where a series of small views of Nice and its surroundings came about. Scenes of this kind are rare in his work: instead of the anxious northern motifs this is a calm, almost orderly observation of a town. It is not a postcard, all the same. The forms are reduced to large planes and the touch is dry and sparse, so that the weave of the canvas shows through the paint in places. Munch was twenty-seven at the time and in the south for the first time; this view is the record of someone looking at a foreign town with no intention of prettifying it.

The night light is not painted with strong contrasts but in muted, damped tones that push the whole scene into quiet. The palette is narrow: bluish grey, olive, pale sand and a few warmer patches on the walls. There is no black anywhere; the darkest passages are deep blue. That is why the town does not read as asleep but merely as silent, as though seen just before dawn. The strokes are short and set side by side rather than blended, which makes the sky seem faintly to tremble although it is in fact entirely still.

Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas, brush stroke by brush stroke, made to order and never a print. Because every canvas is made individually, tones and strokes differ slightly from one to the next; those small differences are the mark of a hand rather than a flaw. The hardest passage here is the sky, which must stay assembled from separate strokes instead of becoming a smooth plane. As a hand-painted oil reproduction this motif asks above all for a feeling for the difference between neighbouring muted tones.

The format is upright and the scene quiet and cool, so the painting suits a bedroom, a work corner or a hallway, where it does not compete with other colours. A pale, neutral wall serves it best; against a strongly coloured wall the damped tones lose their difference from one another. Hang it at eye level in soft light. Among reproductions on canvas this one belongs where it is seen close to, since it is only at close range that the apparently uniform sky reveals how many tones it carries. Because the format is upright and not large, it also sits well in a narrow alcove or between two bookshelves.

Ten sizes are available along with a custom size, and every canvas can be ordered framed or unframed. You choose the frame in our 3D app, where mouldings and colours can be tried against this motif; a neutral grey or pale wooden moulding works better here than a gilded one. More of the artist is in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and painting on the Edvard Munch blog.