Edvard Munch – Train Smoke

Train Smoke

Train Smoke by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas from 1900, held under inventory number MM.M.01092 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 109 x 84 cm. The scene is horizontal and looks out from a wooded height across the broad water of the Oslofjord.

The viewpoint is high, so the water fills the whole middle of the canvas while the bank below drops away steeply. Dark trees rise from the bottom edge at left and right, leaving an open gap through which the fjord is seen, as if through a window of branches.

The tree on the left is a pine with a thin red-brown trunk climbing almost straight to the upper edge. Its branches are rounded dark green clusters, stacked one above another and never touching. Light ground shows between them, so the crown is a run of separate shapes, not a solid mass.

On the right stands a denser group of trees. Their trunks are a warmer red here, the crowns lower and more divided; one of them reaches across the lower right corner and closes off the view towards the shore. This group balances the tall pine on the left and locks the scene between two uprights.

The middle is taken by a white cloud of smoke running from right to left in rounded puffs. It is painted thickly and brightly, with bluish shadows along its underside, and is the lightest place on the canvas. The train itself is nowhere to be seen; only its trail remains.

The water beyond the smoke is wide and still, painted in pale blue and violet bands. Along its upper edge runs a thin yellowish white line curving back towards the centre, marking a current or a shallow. Two small sailing boats sit on the surface, barely indicated with a few strokes.

A long dark island stretches across the middle distance, its low spine covered with growth. Behind it the far shore is suggested in lighter blue, rising towards the right into a gentle slope. A few houses with red roofs stand on that bank, small as marks yet strong enough to pull the eye.

The sky is pale pink and greyish, with separate horizontal bands of cooler colour just above the horizon. It is the lightest part of the scene and warms slightly towards the top edge. There is no hard border between sky and water; the two bands meet in a soft transition.

Below, the bank falls into warm red-brown and ochre ground with a lighter path winding across it. The paint is drier and thinner here, the strokes visible, and in places the weave of the canvas shows through. In the lower right corner, in dark brown, the signature E. Munch.

The motif was made at Nordstrand, south of Oslo, where the painter was then living and where exactly this view opens up. A railway ran along the shore, and train smoke was an everyday sight. Munch painted it not as a machine but as a white form lying across the water for a few moments.

The structure rests on three horizontal bands, sky, water and bank, pierced from top to bottom by the two upright trees. The smoke alone crosses them and ties them together, so the scene is not motionless: the eye travels from the left crown along the smoke to the red roofs.

Our version is hand painted in oils on canvas, stroke by stroke, and is never printed. Because every canvas is made to order, no two match in every detail; small differences are the mark of a human hand, not a fault. The hardest passage here is the smoke, which must stay light and soft without turning grey.

The format is horizontal and the colours cool and light, so the painting works well above a sofa or a sideboard, or in a dining room with enough horizontal space. Keep the wall behind it light and neutral; against a very dark wall the pale sky loses strength. Hang it at eye level in even light.

Ten sizes are offered, from 50 x 37 cm to 231 x 180 cm, along with a custom size; every canvas can be ordered framed or unframed. 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.