Edvard Munch – Vampire

Vampire

Vampire by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1893, held under inventory number MM.M.00679 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 109 x 91 cm and is in landscape format. The scene shows two figures in an embrace: a woman with flaming red hair bends over a man whose head is lowered into her.

The figures fill almost the whole canvas and are seen from close up. The woman’s hair is the strongest element in the picture: it is painted in long orange-red strokes that fall across the man’s back and shoulders, some of them running down like thin threads. Her face is buried in the nape of his neck, so that only the brow and cheek are visible, both pale, the eye closed. Her arms are painted in pale pink flesh; one crosses the foreground horizontally and ends with the hand at the right.

The man is bent forward and stays a dark mass: his clothing and hair are almost black, mixed with blue and green, and his face is not visible at all. A patch of pale bluish white gleams between them. The background is deep blue and blue-violet, and at the left a large grey-brown and olive arc sweeps across the full height like a curved shadow. Warmer red-brown and dark blue patches appear in the upper right corner.

The title is not Munch’s. He called the work Love and Pain; the name Vampire was attached to it by the writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski, and that name is the one that stuck. This is not an art-historical reading but recorded history of the title, and it is worth knowing: there is no bite and no blood on the canvas, only an embrace, and everything else is brought by the name. The motif exists in more than one painted version; our reproduction follows the 109 x 91 cm painting in the Munch Museum. The dating is not entirely settled: our specification gives 1893, while the museum record places the work in the middle of the 1890s.

The paint is laid on fluidly and in long strokes. The hair is made with a single stroke per strand, placed over an already dark ground, so that the red stays bright and does not mix into the underpainting. The edges of the figures are soft and in places dissolve into the background; there is no outline drawing. This is exactly why both bodies break up into planes of colour when seen from close to.

Ours is among our reproductions on canvas, hand-painted 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. This motif asks for the most precision in the hair, since the whole effect depends on it.

The painting is dark and intimate, so it does not belong on a large, brightly lit wall. It works best in a smaller room: a bedroom, a study or the end of a short hallway, where the viewer comes close. As wall decor it wants a warm and somewhat darker surface – deep grey, brick brown or dark green – against which the red hair lights up; on a white wall the dark mass of the bodies flattens out. The light should be warm and directed rather than diffuse.

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.