Edvard Munch – The Girls on the Bridge

The Girls on the Bridge

The Girls on the Bridge by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas held under inventory number NG.M.00844 by the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) in Oslo. The museum dates it cautiously, as allegedly 1901, and we keep that caution here rather than hardening it into a flat date. The original measures 125 x 136 cm and shows three young women at the white railing of a jetty.

The first stands in a pale dress and is turned away from the viewer, the second wears a straw hat, and the third stands behind them. All three are given as calm planes of colour with no worked-up faces; they face the water and not us. The white railing runs diagonally into the depth and divides the scene in two. Behind the girls rises the large dark crown of a lime tree, which takes almost the whole upper right quarter, and beside it stands a pale house with a dark roof. A faint moon sits low in the sky at the left. Below, still water reflects the shore and the crown, so that the scene doubles downward and becomes deeper than it really is. Railing, shore and reflection form three parallel diagonals all running the same way; the only counter-direction is the crown, and that is why it reads as so heavy.

The scene comes from Åsgårdstrand, a small coastal place south of Oslo where Munch kept a summer house. What the title calls a bridge is in fact a wooden jetty along the shore. The motif held him for decades and he carried it through a long series of paintings and prints; this version is among the earliest, and it was first shown under the title Summer Night. The canvas was given to the museum in 1909 by the collector Olaf Schou. The girls are not portraits of particular people: Munch painted them repeatedly as a group looking at the water, and always without worked-up faces.

The paint is laid in broad, soft planes that do not fight one another. The outlines are simplified and the details left out: the dresses are one stroke, the railing one line, the crown a single dark mass. The palette is that of a summer night – pale yellow, green, a reddish dress and the deep blue-green crown – and it is the relation between the light front and the dark back that carries the whole tension. The strokes are long and laid parallel to the plane they build; nowhere is there small drawing to hold the eye back.

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 crown, which must stay heavy and dense without becoming a black hole. Among famous paintings on canvas this is one where the softness of the transitions repays care.

The format is almost square and the mood calm and summery, so the painting suits a living room, a bedroom or a dining room. A light, warm wall serves it best and supports the pale yellow of the shore; against a cool grey wall the scene loses its summer light. Hang it at eye level in soft light. Among reproductions on canvas this one works best alone on the wall, since the motif is calm enough not to need a neighbour. Because the format is almost square, it also sits well on a wider wall above low furniture.

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 supports the summer tone. More of the artist is in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and painting on the Edvard Munch blog.