Edvard Munch – Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu

Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu

Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas from 1919, held under inventory number NG.M.01867 by the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo. The original measures 131 x 150 cm. The scene is upright and shows the painter himself seated in a wicker armchair in the middle of a room, wrapped in a heavy dressing gown.

The figure sits to the right of centre and faces the viewer directly. The head is tilted slightly, the face is drawn and hollow, the eyes sunk and dark, the mouth open as though breath were short. The hair is thin and disordered, the skin pale with green and violet shadows. This face is the most fully worked passage in the picture.

A dark brown gown falls across the body in deep folds, and a white shirt with a loose collar shows beneath it. The hands rest in the lap, painted pale and almost without detail. A blanket is spread over the legs in broad vertical bands of red, green and dark blue, the strongest area of colour in the lower half.

Behind at the left stands an unmade bed with light bedding, across which the wide green loops of a coverlet wind. Those green lines are drawn in one movement and stay visible as drawing. The wall behind the figure is warm orange ochre, laid so sparely that the weave of the canvas shows through it.

At the upper left the signature and the year are written in red, and along the right edge runs a vertical green-blue band that reads as a door jamb or a curtain. The floor is green and blue in long strokes, and at the lower right a scatter of small red, orange and blue marks is left standing.

The armchair is of pale yellow-green wicker and is drawn with an open line; its contours do not close everywhere, so the back of the chair opens into the wall behind it in places. The paint is thin and rapid throughout, with no smooth transitions. It is laid in broad layers, and the ground is left to take part in the colour.

The work was made when the influenza epidemic that followed the First World War was sweeping Europe and Munch himself fell ill. He painted himself while recovering, in his own room and in his own dressing gown, without flattery. The scene is therefore not the portrait of an eminent painter but the image of a patient barely back on his feet.

The structure is plain and firm. The upright of the figure stands in the middle of the canvas, balanced at the left by the pale horizontal mass of the bed and at the right by the dark band along the edge. The warm wall behind and the cool floor in front enclose the figure from two sides, so that it reads as isolated even though the room around it is not empty.

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 fine art reproduction the hardest passage is the face, built from sparse rapid strokes; smoothed too far, the invalid disappears and only a seated gentleman is left.

The format is upright and large and the colours are warm and harshly alive, so this piece of wall art needs a calm wall and some distance. It works well in a study, a library or a wide hallway, less well in a bedroom, where the subject does not belong. The ground should be light and neutral; against a warm ochre wall the painted wall merges into it. Hang it at eye level in even light.

Ten sizes are offered from 40 x 45 cm to 180 x 200 cm, along with a custom size; every canvas can be ordered framed or unframed. 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.