Edvard Munch – The Sun

The Sun

The Sun by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1911, held under inventory number MM.M.00714 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 225 x 179.5 cm. A huge sun rises over the water between two rocky headlands, and straight rays break out of it across the entire surface, running over the sky, the sea and the rocks alike.

The sun stands in the upper half, a little left of centre. Its core is a white-yellow disc with a pale blue mark at the middle, and around it concentric bands of short cream, pink and pale yellow strokes spread outward like wreaths. Nothing in this sun is smooth: it is assembled from hundreds of separate touches that nowhere melt into a single plane.

Long straight rays leave the disc, each drawn in one stroke from its edge to the edge of the canvas. Their colours are yellow, orange-red, pink, pale blue and green, and because they carry on over water and rock instead of stopping at the horizon, the whole scene reads as one lit thing rather than a sky above a landscape. At the upper right a faint arc of rainbow shows in pink and green.

The sky is a warm sand-ochre, much of it bare or barely stained canvas, scattered with short green, white, pink and blue strokes. Below the sun lies a band of blue and blue-green sea laid in horizontal strokes, with a pale vertical column of reflection banded in darker blue and white. At the left rises a large dark blue-green headland crossed by red and yellow ray-lines; at the right are grey-blue rocks and a mauve mass along the far edge. The foreground is a green slope with orange-red rays running over it, and at the lower right green foliage is dabbed with pink and yellow. The signature and a date sit in the bottom right corner.

Munch painted this motif again and again. The Munch Museum holds several versions, among them very large ones such as MM.M.00963 at 775 x 447 cm and MM.M.00964 at 500 x 310 cm, and two more of 1910, MM.M.00362 and MM.M.00361, both around 205 x 163 cm. Ours is the version of 1911 measuring 225 x 179.5 cm. There is no human figure anywhere in the scene; the only event is the rising itself, and it is that emptiness that makes the sun read as a source of power rather than as part of a landscape.

The paint is thin and quick. Much of the sky was left almost untouched so that the warm sand ground carries the light itself, and the rays are pulled edge-on in a single sweep with no later correction. A vertical seam runs the full height down the middle, because the canvas is made of two widths joined, and the surface carries visible abrasion and small losses of paint. That is the state of the object rather than a fault in the photograph, and on a surface this large and this thinly painted it is part of how the work looks.

Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke, made to order and never printed. Because each canvas is painted for its own order, no two match down to the detail; the small differences in the paint are the mark of a hand rather than a flaw. As an oil on canvas reproduction this motif is demanding in the rays, since each has to stay one unbroken stroke; corrected, a ray loses its speed and with it the whole effect.

Because the scene is bright and markedly horizontal, the painting carries a large wall and a bigger room: above a long sofa, in a dining room or in an office. Hand-painted canvas art of this kind needs standing-back room: the rays only gather from a few metres away. The range is warm, so a calm light wall suits it; a strongly coloured ground swallows the ochre sky. Hang it at eye level or a little above. The light should be even and rather cool, as a warm lamp pushes the sand-coloured sky toward brown.

Ten sizes are available from 50 x 40 cm up to 231 x 180 cm, close to the original, 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.