Description
The Girls on the Bridge
The Girls on the Bridge by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas held by the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) in Oslo under inventory number NG.M.00844. The museum dates it cautiously, as allegedly 1901, and we keep that caution here rather than hardening it into a flat date. It measures 125 x 136 cm and shows three young women at the white railing of a jetty: the first, in a pale dress, turned away from the viewer, the second in a straw hat, the third standing behind them. Behind rises the large dark crown of a lime tree, and beside it a pale house with a dark roof. A faint moon sits low in the sky at the left, and below, still water reflects the shore. This is the version our hand-painted reproduction follows.
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 same patron who later passed further works by Munch to the collection. The paint is laid on in broad, soft bands: the tree crown is almost a single dark plane and the water a horizontal, wavering layer, so that the whole picture reads as calm and, at the same time, faintly uneasy.
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 mood is quiet and summery, so the painting works well in a room where people stay a while – a living room, a dining room or a bedroom. Its palette of greens, whites and dusty blues sits with warm wood and light walls, and the diagonal of the railing leads the eye upward, so the picture also carries a slightly higher hanging.
It is available in ten sizes, from a smaller upright format to a large 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.
| Year: | allegedly 1901 |
| Original size: | 125 cm x 136 cm |
| Style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located at: | National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet), Oslo |
