Edvard Munch – Self-Portrait on the Glass Veranda

Self-Portrait on the Glass Veranda

Self-Portrait on the Glass Veranda by Edvard Munch is an oil and crayon painting on wooden panel of 1930–1933, held under inventory number MM.M.00245 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 55.5 x 45.5 cm and lies across. The painter shows himself in his own glazed veranda at Ekely.

The head takes the centre and is large for the format. We see it from the front, turned very slightly to the right and cropped just above the crown. The forehead is high, the hair thin, the brows heavy, the mouth closed and turned down. The look does not come towards us but passes somewhere to one side, and that is what makes the face read as gathered and closed in on itself.

The face is built from oppositions of warm and cool: ochre and orange planes on the forehead and nose, green and olive shadows under the eyes and along the jaw. Munch does not smooth the transitions but lets the two colours meet at an edge, which keeps the face in movement even where the skin is still.

The shoulders and jacket are given in quick parallel drags of green, violet and dark blue. Below the neck a white collar and a pale green tie appear, the only bright vertical in the lower half. The strokes are so open here that the ground shows between them.

Behind him the veranda opens up. Upright dark window frames and slanting bars cut the background into fields through which the garden is visible. At the left stands a bare tree painted in white and grey drags, and at the right violet and blue strokes spill across the glass, reading as branches or as reflection.

The space is therefore double: interior and garden at once, separated only by a thin grid of window bars. Munch painted a great deal from this veranda at Ekely during these years, and the motif of a glass wall between himself and the world returns again and again in his late work.

The colour rests on green. Green is in the background, in the jacket, in the shadow of the face and even in the tie, so that the ochre and orange passages of the face burn as the only genuinely warm plane. The violet touches in the window are the counterweight that keeps the upper half alive.

The handling is open and rapid. Besides oil, Munch used crayon, whose dry lines are visible in the hair, beside the eyes and across the shoulders; in places the paint is thin enough for the wooden panel to show through. The work is drawing and painting at the same time.

The museum records it as unsigned and dates it between 1930 and 1933; among the sitters it names Edvard Munch himself. The painter was then in his seventies, and this is one of a long series of self-portraits he made throughout his life.

The structure is simple and firm: a large head in the middle of a grid of uprights and diagonals. Those lines make the head seem calmer still, since it is the only round shape among so many straight ones. The eye goes directly to the face and stays there.

Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke, made to order and never printed. Said plainly: the original is oil and crayon on a wooden panel, while our reproduction is painted in oil on canvas, the usual support for a hand-painted work of this kind. The hardest passage here is the face, which must stay warm in the middle of all that green.

The format lies across and the gaze is direct and serious, so the painting suits a study, a library, or a strong accent in a living room. A quiet, pale wall serves it best. Hang it at eye level in even light.

Ten sizes are available from 45 x 38 cm up to 223 x 179 cm, along with a custom size, 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.