Edvard Munch – The Night Wanderer

The Night Wanderer

The Night Wanderer by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1923–1924, held under inventory number MM.M.00589 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 68 x 90 cm and stands upright. The work belongs to the group of late self-portraits the artist made at Ekely, the property above Oslo where he spent the last two decades of his life.

The scene is nocturnal. Behind the figure a row of window panes is filled with dense dark blue, the night pressing against the glass, while the window frames are laid in a pale ochre that supplies almost all the light in the upper half of the canvas. The painter stands in a darkened room he has walked into from somewhere else in the house, pushed over to the left so that the right-hand side stays open into the dark. The face is the strangest passage. The eye sockets are painted as two dark hollows, so that the gaze cannot quite be met. A reddish brown runs across the cheek and the temple, and the forehead is lit with yellow-green strokes. The hair is yellow-green and disordered. Below the chin a pale greenish white collar opens, the single bright note on the whole standing figure. The coat is a deep blue-black that spreads across the lower half of the canvas.

The work belongs to the last decade of the painter’s life. Munch painted himself again and again, but the late self-portraits are unlike the early ones: instead of asking who he is, they return to the question of how he is still here. The title under which the work is known describes a situation rather than an event; someone walks through his own house at night and stops.

The paint is laid quickly, in broad drags that are not corrected. Munch worked wet into wet, so that the yellow-green on the forehead and the blue-black of the coat meet and mix a little in places. In some passages the layer is thin enough for the weave of the canvas to show through. The palette is narrowed to blue, black, ochre and a few reddish and greenish accents in the face.

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 eye sockets, which must stay dark and open instead of becoming two black dots. As a hand-painted oil reproduction this motif asks above all for calm in the darkest passages.

The format is upright and the scene dark and concentrated, so the painting suits a study, a library or a hallway, where it is seen close to and where there are no strong colours around it. A light, quiet wall serves it best, since the work itself is dark; against a dark wall the coat merges with its surroundings. Hang it at eye level in soft light and not opposite a window. As hand-painted wall art in a room where people read in the evening it works more strongly than in a bright living room.

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