Edvard Munch – The Next Day

The Next Day

The Next Day by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1894, held under inventory number NG.M.00808 by the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 152 x 115 cm. A woman lies on her back across a bed with her head hanging back over the pillow, and in the left foreground bottles and glasses stand on a table.

She lies across the picture with her head at the right. The head is thrown back, the face turned upward and slightly toward us, the mouth a little open and the eyes closed. Long dark hair spreads across the white pillow. She wears a white blouse cut low at the neck over a pale skirt; one arm falls down along the right edge, and a bare foot reaches toward the lower right corner.

Over the lower part of her body lies a heavy olive-brown quilt flecked with dark marks, forming a large triangular mass left of centre and taking up much of the canvas. The bed is a dark red-brown frame, with a turned post at the top centre and a rounded head at the right; the bedding is white and pink-cream. In the lower left corner is the edge of a table in ochre yellow, carrying two bottles – one dark maroon with a pale label, the other dark green – and two glasses, the taller of which has reddish dregs at the bottom. The background is a warm brown-mauve wall, with a pale grey-blue area at the left.

The title says what happened earlier without showing it, and the bottles and glasses are the only narrative objects in the painting. The work belongs to the Frieze of Life and was thought scandalous when it was first shown; that is recorded in contemporary responses rather than anything visible on the canvas itself. Munch painted the motif in more than one version; our reproduction follows the National Museum one measuring 152 x 115 cm. In the museum record the work also appears under the title The Day After.

The paint is laid on densely and softly, without hard edges. The quilt is the most worked passage on the canvas, with visible brush marks and dark flecks that give the cloth its weight. The white blouse and the pillow are painted with the lightest colour and pull the eye straight to the face. There are almost no contours; the forms separate by tone, and the edges of the bed in places dissolve into the wall.

Ours is hand-painted canvas art, made in oil, stroke by stroke, and never printed. Because each canvas is made specifically for the order, no two match down to the detail; the small differences in the paint are the mark of a hand rather than a flaw. With this motif the hard part is holding the difference between the white of the blouse and the white of the pillow, which are not the same white.

The format is horizontal and the composition sits low, so the painting works well above a longer piece of furniture – a chest of drawers, a bench or a low cabinet. Because the whole range is warm and earthy, it suits a calm wall in white, oatmeal or pale grey; a strongly coloured wall quarrels with the olive-brown quilt. Among famous paintings on canvas this one is best hung a little lower than usual, since the scene is seen from a seated height. The light should be warm and soft.

Ten sizes are available along with a custom size, and every canvas can be ordered framed or unframed. More of the artist is in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and painting on the Edvard Munch blog.