Edvard Munch – The Haymaker

The Haymaker

The Haymaker by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas from 1917, held under inventory number MM.M.00387 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 151 x 130 cm. The scene is a summer meadow in the middle of the mowing: a man stands a little left of centre and cuts, with tall grass spreading all around him.

The figure is turned in three-quarter profile with his back slightly towards the viewer, his head bowed down to the work. He wears a pale blue-white cap, a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a dark blue-black waistcoat over it, and dark brown, almost wine-red trousers. His forearms are burnt orange from the sun, and his hands grip the handle of a scythe at waist height.

The scythe runs in one long pale line down towards the right and ends in a blade at the lower centre of the scene. It is painted with a single rapid stroke and stays almost translucent, so that the grass shows through it.

The meadow takes up most of the canvas. It is built from long upright and diagonal strokes in green, yellow, pink, lilac and white, scattered with small red and blue dots that read as flowers. At the left the grass stands taller and denser; at the right, broad diagonals mark the swathes already cut and lead the eye towards the background.

At the right in the distance stands a large round green tree, with lower bushes beside it and a red-brown line of path or fence. At the upper left a grey-blue band of water runs across, and above everything is a pale lilac and white sky painted in broad curving strokes. The sky is not calm: the strokes turn and give the scene its wind.

The paint is thick and rapid. It is laid in long directional strokes that make no attempt to hide, and in places the ground shows between them. Munch did not paint the grass as a plane but as a mass of separate marks, so the meadow moves the longer it is looked at. The range of colour is high and bright: green, yellow and pink dominate, and only the figure and the tree are dark.

The structure is simple. The mower forms the one dark upright in a bright field, and the tree at the right balances it. Between them run the diagonals of the cut swathes, giving the scene direction and depth although it has neither perspective lines nor a horizon in the ordinary sense. That is why it reads as close and open at the same time.

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 piece of hand-painted canvas art the hardest passage is the grass, which has to stay built from separate strokes; blended into one green plane the meadow stops moving and the scene loses its wind.

The format is landscape and the scene bright and colourful, so it works in a smaller room and needs little distance. It suits a living room, a dining room or an office, because the subject is friendly and reads at once. The wall should be calm and light; a strongly patterned ground fights the grass. Hang it at eye level, with even light so the pink and lilac strokes do not go grey.

Nine sizes are offered from 40 x 36 cm to 215 x 190 cm, along with a custom size; every canvas can be ordered framed or unframed. This oil on canvas reproduction and 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.