Edvard Munch – Starry Night

Starry Night

Starry Night by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1922–1924, held under inventory number MM.M.00032 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 100 x 120.5 cm and stands upright. The scene is a night landscape seen from a rise: large stars burn above, and a broad pale snow slope with a path stretches below.

The upper third is taken by a deep blue-green sky. The stars are not dots but soft rings of light in blue, white and green, the way they look when the eye is not focused. Beneath them runs a lighter band of sky in green and pink that separates sky from ground. A dark ridge drags across the middle, and the windows of houses glow on it: a warm orange patch at the left, a clear yellow window at the right. Left of centre a dark conifer stands on the crest. The lower half is a broad pale blue-white slope with a path winding down it and a fence running beside it. At the very front lie heavy dark shapes: a post, a shadow, and a dark mass in the right corner. The scene is built from three horizontal layers – sky, ridge, snow – which the diagonal of the path and fence ties together into depth. There is no figure anywhere; the only sign of life is the lit windows on the ridge, and it is they that make the night feel inhabited although nobody stands in it.

The scene comes from around Munch’s house at Ekely on the edge of what was then Kristiania, where he spent his last decades and painted the night sky more than once. The museum records the work as Starry Night of 1922–1924. It should be said plainly that the Munch Museum holds several paintings titled Starry Night, among them MM.M.00009 and MM.M.00187, and that the best-known Starry Night of 1893 is at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Our source is the 1922–1924 canvas MM.M.00032 and none of the others. Munch painted the night sky again and again in his late years, often from the same spot in his own garden, so this is one of a series of versions rather than a single occasion.

The paint is laid wet into wet in broad drags that follow the curve of the slope. The snow is not white: it is built from pale blue, greyish pink and green, and the shadows are pulled into a cool blue. The stars are worked with circular strokes around a bright core, so the light seems to radiate outwards. In places the layer is thin enough for the weave of the canvas to show through. The palette is cool and narrow: blues, greenish tones and pale pink, out of which only two warm patches rise, the lit windows. Those two small warm accents carry the whole tension of the scene.

Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas, brush stroke by brush stroke, made to order and never a print. Because each is painted for its own order, no two match down to the last detail, and the small differences are the mark of a hand. The hardest passage here is the stars, which must stay soft and radiating rather than harden into white spots. As a museum-quality reproduction this motif stands or falls on the sky.

The format is upright and the mood calm and cool, so the painting suits a bedroom, a living room or a study where only a table lamp burns in the evening. A pale, quiet wall serves it best; against a dark wall the blue of the sky merges with its surroundings and loses depth. Hang it at eye level in soft, diffused light. Among reproductions of famous paintings this is one that rewards being seen close to, above a sofa or a bed. Because the motif is upright, it also sits well in a narrower room or on the wall between two windows, where a wider painting would have no space.

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. More of the artist is in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and painting on the Edvard Munch blog.