Edvard Munch – Self-Portrait. Between the Clock and the Bed

Self-Portrait. Between the Clock and the Bed

Self-Portrait. Between the Clock and the Bed by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas from 1940–1943, held under inventory number MM.M.00023 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 120.5 x 149.5 cm. The painter stands in the middle of his own room, between a tall standing clock at the left and a bed at the right.

The figure is upright and motionless, the arms at the sides, the hands slightly open. The head is bald with white hair at the temples, the face reddish brown and dried out. The eyes are dark hollows without shine and the mouth a thin straight line. He wears a dark blue-black jacket over a white shirt with an open collar, and dark green-blue trousers. Nothing in the stance suggests movement; the figure stands the way the furniture around it stands.

At the left edge is a tall standing clock in dark brown wood, almost black in shadow. It carries a pale yellow-green dial with no hands, and lower down two yellow marks glint in the case. The clock is narrow and tall and runs from the upper to the lower edge of the scene, so that it reads as a second, darker figure beside the painter.

At the right stands the bed. The coverlet is boldly patterned: thick red and black diagonal strokes run across a white ground, crossing in a lozenge at the centre and gathering into a row of vertical black bars at the foot. The bedhead is pale, and a red-brown panel stands beside it. The bed is the only genuinely lively part of the scene and competes in colour with the painter himself.

Behind the figure a passage opens into a second room with a yellow-orange wall. The painter’s own works hang there: a large red-orange shape above, and below it a row of smaller frames in pale colours. At the far right, against a green-blue wall, a pale nude figure appears, another painted canvas. The floor is brown-olive, with a greenish patch covering it at the lower right.

The paint is thin and quick. In places it is dragged so sparely that the ground shows through; elsewhere it is laid in long, open strokes that make no attempt to hide. The face is worked further than anything else, and even so with only a handful of touches. The range of colour is unusually bright for so heavy a subject: yellow, orange, red and green are pure and strong, and only the jacket and the clock are dark.

The structure is markedly symmetrical. The painter stands exactly at the centre, the clock closes the left edge, the bed the right, and the passage behind opens depth precisely behind his head. The clock and the bed are not incidental: one measures time and the other is where that time will run out, and the figure between them has nowhere to step. That balance is what makes the scene calmer and at the same time heavier than it would be had he stood to one side.

Our version is hand-painted in oils on canvas, stroke by stroke, and is never printed. Because every canvas is made individually to order, no two match down to the last detail; small differences in the paint are the mark of a human hand and not a fault. In this piece of hand-painted canvas art the hardest passage is the coverlet, whose strokes must stay separate and rapid; drawn out as a pattern, the bed becomes wallpaper and the scene loses its tension.

The format is upright and the scene bright and colourful, so it carries a smaller wall and needs little distance. It works well in a study, a library or a hallway, where it can be looked at closely. The wall should be calm and light, because the yellow and orange close up against a dark ground. Hang it at eye level, with even and neutral light.

Ten sizes are offered from 40 x 50 cm to 205 x 249 cm, along with a custom size; every canvas can be ordered framed or unframed. This oil on canvas reproduction and more of the painter’s work is in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and work on the Edvard Munch blog.