Edvard Munch – Self-Portrait with a Cod’s Head on the Plate

Self-Portrait with a Cod’s Head on the Plate

Self-Portrait with a Cod’s Head on the Plate by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on a wooden panel of 1940–1942, held under inventory number MM.M.00633 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 45.5 x 55 cm and stands upright. The painter sits at a table, a large fish head on a shallow plate before him.

The figure is shown to the waist and fills almost the whole panel. Munch was in his seventies: the hair white and disordered, the forehead high, the face laid in a strong pink-red that separates sharply from the cool green ground.

The face is built from broad strokes with no softening. The eyes are two dark hollows under heavy brows, looking straight out; the nose is a single red line with a thin moustache beneath. The mouth is closed and grave. Nothing is flattered: an old man’s face, painted without mercy.

He wears a dark blue-green jacket over a white shirt, a red tie running down towards the table. It is the only strong red below the face and carries the eye to the plate.

Both hands rest on the table in the same pink flesh as the face, holding a knife and a fork, each pulled in quick light strokes across the dark blue of the sleeves. They are not in motion; they hold the tools and keep still.

Across the lower middle lies the wide oval of the plate, in blue and green with white reflections. On it rests the head of a cod, turned towards the viewer, its eye pale and gills open, painted in the same green-blue as the plate, so it separates mainly by shape and by that white spark.

The ground is green, built from long vertical strokes running from the top edge down. A darker band stands at the left, a lighter area at the right where the paint thins and the wooden panel shows through. The support is not covered, and the painter did not hide it.

The paint is quick and thin: broad strokes set side by side, nowhere blended, in places barely dragged across the ground. That openness gives the picture its speed, as though caught in a single sitting. The panel is not signed.

It was made at Ekely, the property above Oslo where Munch spent his last years. He painted a series of self-portraits there showing himself old, ill and alone; this is among the most direct, since it sets him not in a room but at a table, in front of food.

The range rests on the warm pink-red of the flesh against the cool green-blue around it, with the red tie as a third colour tying the two together. Because there is so much green, the face and hands read far warmer than they are.

The structure is simple and symmetrical: the head at the centre, the hands to either side, the plate below. The eye moves down from the face, across the tie, to the fish’s eye looking back. That meeting of two gazes carries the whole picture.

Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke, made to order and never printed. The original is on a wooden panel and our reproduction on canvas, which in this motif makes no difference to how it looks. Because each canvas is painted for its own order, no two match down to the detail; the small differences in the paint are the mark of a hand rather than a flaw.

The format is upright and the scene closely framed, so it suits a dining room, a kitchen or a smaller space seen from near by. A pale, plain wall serves it best; on a green wall the ground merges with the room. Hang it at eye level in even light.

Ten sizes are available from 40 x 50 cm up to 205 x 249 cm, along with a custom size, and every canvas can be ordered 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.