Edvard Munch – Rue Lafayette

Rue Lafayette

Rue Lafayette by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1891, held under inventory number NG.M.01725 by the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 73 x 92 cm and stands upright. The scene looks down from a balcony onto a Paris boulevard: a man in a top hat leans on the wrought-iron railing and stares into the depth of the street.

The man stands at the left edge, seen from behind and a little from the side, in a long dark coat with a top hat on his head. Both hands rest on the railing and he leans slightly forward. The ironwork runs across the whole canvas as a hard diagonal that divides the scene in two: balcony and figure above, street below. The roadway falls away steeply to the right and is full of sunlight; small figures and carriages move along it, given in a few strokes and without faces. Tall city façades with rows of windows rise at the left, and at the right stand the edge of the balcony and the pale cloth of an awning. Almost no sky is visible; the street takes the whole space. The scene has no centre in the usual sense: the eye runs down the diagonal of the railing and stops nowhere until it reaches the bottom of the street. That is why the painting reads as a caught moment rather than an ordered view.

The painter signed and dated the canvas: E.Munch 91. 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 viewer stands right beside the man and looks down with him, becoming a participant in the scene rather than an observer of it. Munch repeated the same composition later that year in Rue de Rivoli. The Paris years were a time of learning for him: he looked at what the French painters were doing and tested it on his own motifs before returning to his northern subjects.

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. The planes never merge; roadway, façades and awning are built from the same small strokes and differ only in colour and direction. The palette is coolly bright: brick and sand façades, bluish shadows under the balcony, greenish and grey tones on the roadway. There is almost no black; even the man’s coat is built from dark blue and brown touches.

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 roadway, which must stay assembled from separate touches instead of settling into one bright plane. Among famous paintings on canvas this is a motif that rewards painting slowly.

The format is upright and the scene bright and lively, so the painting suits a living room, a dining room, an office or a hallway, where it brings the feeling of an open window. A pale wall serves it best; against a dark wall the light of the roadway loses its force. Hang it at eye level in even light, ideally where no direct sunbeam falls on it. As hand-painted wall art it also works in a narrower room, since the view itself is directed downward rather than outward. It also sits well above a desk, where it is seen close to and the small touch really tells.

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 pale, narrow moulding supports the airiness of the scene. More of the artist is in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and painting on the Edvard Munch blog.