Description
The Night Wanderer
The Night Wanderer by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas from 1923, held under inventory number MM.M.00589 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 68 x 90 cm and 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 as an almost featureless mass, its folds no more than suggested. The floor is a deep green and the wall at the left a warm pinkish brown. At the right a dark blue-green body of furniture rises, with a narrow pale blue gleam along its foot.
By 1923 Munch had long stopped painting the great symbolist cycles of the 1890s and had turned again and again to himself. The body leans forward, the shoulders are drawn up, and the arms disappear into the darkness of the coat, so that the whole weight of the picture gathers in the head. It is a man awake in his own house at an hour when nobody else is.
Every reproduction is painted by hand in oil on canvas, never printed. Ten sizes are offered, from 48 x 62 cm up to 180 x 230 cm, including the original 68 x 90 cm. More of the artist’s work is in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and painting on the Edvard Munch blog.
| Year: | 1923 |
| Original size: | 68 cm x 90 cm |
| Style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located at: | Munch Museum (Munchmuseet), Oslo |
