Edvard Munch – Spring

Spring

Spring by Edvard Munch is a large oil painting on canvas of 1889, held under inventory number NG.M.00498 by the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 264 x 169.5 cm and lies across. The scene is a sickroom: a sick girl sits in an armchair by a window through which strong spring light pours into the room.

The girl sits a little left of centre, wrapped in a dark blanket, a white pillow behind her head and a white cap on her hair, her hands folded in her lap. Beside her an older woman in a dark dress sits with a cup in her hand, turned towards her. Further back at the left another dark female figure stands beside a tall wooden cabinet. On the table at the left edge stand a bottle, a glass and a cup. The right third is taken by a tall window: the white curtain lifts in the draught, potted plants with green leaves and small flowers stand on the sill, and light floods through the panes as the brightest passage on the whole canvas. Walls, floor and furniture are in warm browns, olives and creams.

The canvas is signed and dated: E.Munch 1889. The sitter is the painter’s sister Johanne Sophie, who died of tuberculosis in 1877 and whom we know from The Sick Child. These are very different works, 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 work 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 paint is laid on densely and evenly, with no visible corrections. Munch builds the room with light rather than with line: the window is a white plane that intensifies towards its centre, and the interior is constructed from warm dark bands that lighten as they approach it. The curtain lifting in the draught is the one movement in an otherwise entirely still room, and it is what keeps the scene from stiffening.

Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas, brush stroke by brush stroke, made to order and never a print. Because every canvas is made individually, tones and strokes differ slightly from one to the next; those small differences are the mark of a hand rather than a flaw. The hardest passage here is the window, which must stay bright and open without becoming an empty white plane. As hand-painted canvas art on this scale the motif asks for patient building of the transitions in the light.

The format is markedly horizontal and the painting large, so it needs a wide unbroken wall and some distance: a living room, a dining room or a broad 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. As wall decor above a long table or a sofa it works best hung a little lower than usual, since the scene is seen from the height of someone seated.

Ten sizes are available along with a custom size, and every canvas can be ordered framed or unframed. You choose the frame in our 3D app, where mouldings and colours can be tried against this motif; at this width a simple, not overly broad moulding serves it best. More of the artist is in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and painting on the Edvard Munch blog.