Edvard Munch – The Fairytale Forest

The Fairytale Forest

The Fairytale Forest by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1901 or 1902, held under inventory number NG.M.02237 by the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) in Oslo. The museum gives two possible years rather than a span, so we write 1901 or 1902 here too. The original measures 106.5 x 79 cm and shows a group of children seen from behind.

The children stand on the edge of a grassy slope and look into a dense spruce wood. Two boys in caps stand at the left, a figure in a wide white hat in the middle, a smaller child in a pale hat beside her, and a further dark figure at the right. Nobody is turned towards us; all are given as small, softly painted shapes without faces. The forest rises in front of them as a row of sharp dark spikes that run the whole width of the canvas and close the scene like a wall. A pale sky with drawn-out clouds stands above it, and a light path winds away at the right, the only opening in an otherwise closed scene.

The title says how Munch understood the scene: the wood is not described botanically but as the backdrop of a fairytale, one the children are looking into but have not yet entered. The trees are reduced to almost uniform dark triangles while the children are painted softly and small; the contrast between the two carries the whole tension of the work. The painting belongs to Munch’s years around 1900, when alongside the great Frieze of Life motifs he was also painting landscapes and scenes with children, often near Åsgårdstrand.

The paint is laid in broad, calm planes. The forest is built from a few dark green and blue-green tones that scarcely differ, so that any single tree is lost in the whole. The grass in front is lighter and more varied, and the sky is pulled in long horizontal drags. In places the layer is thin and the weave of the canvas shows through.

Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas, brush stroke by brush stroke, made to order and never a print. Because every canvas is made individually, tones and strokes differ slightly from one to the next; those small differences are the mark of a hand rather than a flaw. The hardest passage here is the forest, which must stay dense and unified without becoming a flat dark plane with no depth. As a museum-quality reproduction this motif asks above all for patience in the greens.

The format is upright and the mood calm and a little mysterious, so the painting suits a child’s room, a bedroom, a living room or a hallway. A light, warm wall serves it best and supports the pale sky; against a dark wall the forest loses its weight. Hang it at eye level in soft light. Among reproductions of famous paintings this one belongs where it is seen close to, since only at close range does the apparently uniform forest reveal how many greens it carries.

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; a pale wooden moulding works better here than a dark one. More of the artist is in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and painting on the Edvard Munch blog.