Edvard Munch – The Dead Mother

The Dead Mother

The Dead Mother by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1899, held under inventory number 377-1918/2 by the Kunsthalle Bremen. The original measures 90 x 100 cm. A small girl stands in the foreground with both hands pressed over her ears, and behind her a dead woman lies on a bed.

The girl is placed at the centre and turned straight toward the viewer. Her hair is pale yellow and short, her eyes large, blue and wide open, her mouth closed tight. She wears a white or cream pinafore over a pale dress with puffed sleeves, dark navy stockings and dark shoes. Her hands are raised to both ears with the elbows spread out to either side; that single gesture carries the whole painting.

Behind her the bed and the lying figure extend away to the right. The woman lies with her head on a white pillow, seen in profile; her face is a pale grey-green and her hair is covered with a dark cap. The bed and the wall behind are a muted sage green, mottled and restless in many places, and a reddish-brown line runs along the edge of the bed. The floor in the foreground is a strong rust orange and takes up almost a third of the canvas; it is this warm plane that separates the viewer from the scene.

The motif is usually connected with the death of Munch’s mother, who died in 1868 when the painter was five years old; illness and death in the family returned in his work throughout his life. Munch treated the same scene in several versions and techniques, and our reproduction follows the one in the Kunsthalle Bremen measuring 90 x 100 cm. The work appears in the literature under several titles, among them Death and the Child, which is worth knowing if you go looking for the original; it is the inventory number that identifies it reliably.

The paint is laid on thinly and dryly, without gloss, so that the weave of the canvas shows through in places. The green wall is built from short, crossing strokes that never merge into an even plane, and it is exactly this restlessness that gives the background its sense of vibration. The girl is painted more smoothly and with more substance than anything else, so she steps forward physically as well as compositionally.

Ours is among our reproductions on canvas, hand-painted in oil, stroke by stroke, and never printed. Because each canvas is made specifically for the order, no two match down to the detail; the small differences in the paint are the mark of a hand rather than a flaw. This motif is one of the more demanding, since the difference between the smoothly painted child and the agitated background has to be preserved.

The scene is quiet and serious, so it does not belong on the main wall of a living room but somewhere the viewer chooses to go: a study, a library, a hallway or a quiet alcove. The rust orange floor is the strongest colour on the canvas, so the painting sits well against a warm, earth-toned wall and warm-coloured wood; against a cold blue wall it falls out of tune. As hand-painted wall art it should be hung so that the girl’s eyes are at roughly the eye level of a standing viewer, since the scene is built on that look. The light should be soft and even.

Ten sizes are available along with a custom size, and every canvas can be ordered framed or unframed. More of the artist is in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and painting on the Edvard Munch blog.