Description
Spring
Spring by Edvard Munch is a large oil painting on canvas of 1889 that carries inventory number NG.M.00498 at the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) in Oslo. It measures 264 x 169.5 cm and shows a sick girl seated in an armchair by a window, wrapped in a dark blanket and resting against a white pillow. An older woman sits beside her with a cup in her hand. A bottle and a glass stand on the table at the left, and at the right a tall window opens: the white curtain billows, potted plants stand on the sill, and strong spring light pours through the panes into the room. The canvas is signed and dated: E.Munch 1889. This is the version our hand-painted reproduction follows.
The sitter is the same sister, Johanne Sophie, who died of tuberculosis in 1877 and whom we know from The Sick Child. This is a very different work, however: where The Sick Child is scratched and almost ruined in its paint layer, Spring is large, carefully carried through and finished to the last corner, the kind of picture Kristiania then expected from a young painter. With it Munch showed that he had mastered naturalist painting; only afterwards did he allow himself to leave it behind.
The title carries the contrast: spring is outside, beyond the window, and it reaches the girl only as light – the girl who will not live to see it. The curtain lifting in the draught is the one movement in an otherwise entirely still room.
Our reproduction is hand-painted throughout in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke and always to order; it is not a print. Because every canvas is made individually, tones and strokes differ slightly from one copy to the next.
The format is markedly horizontal and the painting is large, so it needs a wide unbroken wall and some distance – a living room, a dining room or a gallery corridor. Its warm browns, olives and creams sit well with light wood and with white or sand-coloured walls, while the bright band of the window brings a feeling of a further opening into the room.
It is available in ten sizes, from a smaller horizontal format to a very wide canvas, and we can also make it to a size you specify. Other works by the same artist are among the paintings of Edvard Munch.
| Year: | 1889 |
| Original size: | 264 cm x 169.5 cm |
| Style: | Naturalism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located at: | National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet), Oslo |
