Edvard Munch – The Dance of Life

The Dance of Life

The Dance of Life by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas from 1899-1900, held by the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) in Oslo under inventory number NG.M.00941. It measures 191 x 125 cm and shows dancers on the grass beside the sea under a moon whose reflection falls on the water as a single upright column of light. At the centre a couple dances: a man in black and a woman in a red dress that winds around his feet. A young woman in white stands alone at the left, an older woman in black at the right, hands down and face severe. More couples turn in the background. This is the version our hand-painted reproduction follows.

The painting is a central work in Munch’s cycle The Frieze of Life, in which he gathered his motifs of love, anxiety and death. The three female figures are usually read as three ages of one woman: the girl in white, the mature woman in red, and the widow in black. That is an interpretation, not something the painter wrote down. It is likewise often said that Munch was prompted by Helge Rode’s 1898 play Dansen gaar, a copy of which he kept in his library; that too remains an assumption rather than an established fact.

The canvas was bought in Oslo in 1910 by the collector Olaf Schou, who presented it to the National Gallery the same year; the museum record still carries it as a gift from Olaf Schou, 1910. Munch laid the paint on in broad, flowing strokes, so that dresses and grass run together into one movement while the outlines of the figures stay soft and unfinished.

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, so the painting needs a wide unbroken wall – above a long sofa, a sideboard or a dining table, where it can be seen from some distance. Its dark greens and blues sit well with warm wood and with white or sand-coloured walls, while the red dress at the centre works as the one strong point of colour in 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, and his life and work are covered in the biography of Edvard Munch.