Description
Starry Night
Starry Night by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1922 that carries inventory number MM.M.00032 at the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. It measures 100 x 120.5 cm and shows a night landscape seen from a rise. Large stars with rings of light burn in the upper sky, a pale band of sky lies beneath them, and a dark ridge with the lit windows of houses runs across the middle. A single dark conifer stands on the crest, left of centre. Below stretches a broad pale slope with a path winding down it, and in the foreground lie heavy dark shapes of shadow and shrub. This is the version our hand-painted reproduction follows.
The scene comes from around Munch’s house at Ekely on the edge of what was then Kristiania, where he spent the last decades of his life and painted the night sky more than once. The stars are not dots but soft rings of light, the way they look when the eye is not focused; that handling brings them close to the feeling of looking rather than to a description of the sky.
Worth saying to avoid confusion: the Munch Museum holds several paintings titled Starry Night, among them MM.M.00009 and MM.M.00187, and the best-known Starry Night of 1893 is in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Our source is the 1922 canvas MM.M.00032 and none of the others.
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 painting is dark but not gloomy, and works best in a room with warm light in the evening – a bedroom, a living room or a library. Its blues, deep greens and creams sit with darker wood and with white or grey walls; because the stars are the only bright points, the picture reads in a quiet room as a window onto night and carries a larger format well.
It is available in ten sizes, from a smaller upright format to a large 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, and his life and work are covered in the biography of Edvard Munch.
| Year: | 1922 |
| Original size: | 100 cm x 120.5 cm |
| Style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located at: | Munch Museum (Munchmuseet), Oslo |
