Edvard Munch – The Death of Marat

The Death of Marat

The Death of Marat by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas from 1907, held under inventory number MM.M.00351 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 199 x 150 cm. The scene is a room with a bed: a dead man lies across it, and in front of it a naked woman stands upright, turned straight towards the viewer.

The man’s body lies across the lower half of the canvas. The head is at the far left, thrown back over the edge of the bed, the hair dark and the face barely legible. The arms are spread wide, the palms open upwards. The flesh is pale with greenish grey shadows, and the contour is drawn in long brown and red strokes that run through the body and tie it to the sheet beneath.

The woman stands to the right of centre and takes up the full height of the scene. Her body is pale pink and off-white, the shoulders narrow, the arms at her sides, the hands slightly open. Her hair is long and red-orange, falling over both shoulders. The face is small, the eyes dark and still, the mouth narrow. She shows neither movement nor expression; she stands the way an upright stands.

The bedding is white with blue and grey shadows. A strong red stain spreads across the middle, and at the lower left is a larger red plane edged with white. Red is the only genuinely saturated colour in the picture and returns only in small dots at the upper left and in the fruit at the right.

The background is a dark blue-green wall with red dots scattered across the upper left. At the upper right runs a bright green vertical band flecked with red. In the right foreground is a pink-violet plane with a fine pattern, carrying a dark object, a yellow half-round form and a round tray with three green-red fruits. A narrow ochre-brown band of floor runs along the lower edge.

The paint is thin and scrubbed. It is dragged with a large brush into long horizontal bands that make no attempt to hide, and in places the weave of the canvas shows through. Nothing is smoothed: the contours stay open and the two bodies are made from the same strokes as the sheet and the wall, so the figures do not lift away from the room but are woven into it.

The structure is simple and hard. The woman forms an upright exactly at the centre of the canvas and the man’s body a horizontal across the lower half; together they make a cross that holds the whole surface. Nothing indicates what happened before or what will follow. Munch removed the narrative and left only two bodies, a red stain, and a gaze returned to the viewer.

Our version is hand-painted in oils on canvas, stroke by stroke, and is never printed. Because every canvas is made individually to order, no two match down to the last detail; small differences in the paint are the mark of a human hand and not a fault. In this fine art reproduction the hardest passage is the thinness itself: the colour has to stay dragged and sparse, because laid on thickly the scene loses its rawness and turns smooth.

The format is landscape and large, and the scene is dark and sombre in colour, so this piece of wall art needs a long wall and some distance for the bodies and the red stain to balance. It works well in a spacious living room, a gallery corridor or an office, less well in a bedroom or dining room. The wall should be light and calm, because a dark ground swallows the green background. Hang it at eye level, with even and neutral light.

Ten sizes are offered from 50 x 37 cm to 231 x 180 cm, among them the original size of 200 x 150 cm, along with a custom size; every canvas can be ordered framed or unframed. More of the painter’s work is in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and work on the Edvard Munch blog.