Description
Rue Lafayette
Rue Lafayette by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas from 1891, held by the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) in Oslo under inventory number NG.M.01725. It measures 73 x 92 cm and looks down from a balcony onto a Paris boulevard: a man in a top hat and long coat leans on the wrought-iron railing and stares into the depth of the street, which falls away steeply to the right. Below are small figures and carriages on the sunlit roadway, tall city façades rise at the left, and at the right stand the edge of the balcony and the pale cloth of an awning. The painter signed and dated the canvas: E.Munch 91. This is the version our hand-painted reproduction follows.
The work belongs to Munch’s Paris period, when he was living on the Rue Lafayette and painting the view straight down from his own balcony. What is unusual is the angle: the railing runs across the whole canvas as a hard diagonal and the street opens beneath it, so that the viewer stands right beside the man and looks down with him. Munch repeated the composition the same year in Rue de Rivoli.
The touch here is small and broken, built from short separated dabs of the brush – Munch’s answer to the French Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism he was seeing at close range in Paris. The colour is light and airy, a surprising face for a painter better known for dark northern motifs.
Our reproduction is hand-painted throughout in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke and always to order; it is not a print. Because every canvas is made individually, tones and strokes differ slightly from one copy to the next.
The picture is bright and urban, so it works well in a room that lacks a view out – a hallway, a study or a smaller living room. Its sand, brick and bluish tones sit with light wood and white walls, and the strong diagonal of the railing gives a narrow wall a depth it does not otherwise have.
It is available in ten sizes, from a smaller upright format to a large canvas, and we can also make it to a size you specify. Other works by the same artist are among the paintings of Edvard Munch, and his life and work are covered in the biography of Edvard Munch.
| Year: | 1891 |
| Original size: | 73 cm x 92 cm |
| Style: | Impressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located at: | National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet), Oslo |
