Edvard Munch – Winter in the Woods, Nordstrand

Winter in the Woods, Nordstrand

Winter in the Woods, Nordstrand by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on cardboard of 1899, held under inventory number NG.M.00570 by the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 90 x 60.5 cm and lies across. The scene is a snow-covered spruce wood: dark trunks rise out of deep snow, and a heavy dark canopy fills the upper half.

The trunks are near-black and run straight up as a row of verticals that divide the scene into narrow bands. Above them a dense needled ceiling closes over, and patches of snow lie on the boughs as the only bright marks in the upper half. Below stretches a broad white drift with rounded snow mounds at the left and the right, and between them a bluish shadowed track winds away. The horizontal of the snow and the verticals of the trunks meet without transition; there are almost no middle tones, so the wood reads as a cut-out silhouette laid on a bright ground. There is almost no depth: the wood does not recede but stands like a wall just in front of the viewer, and only the track offers a way inward. There is no figure, no house and no sky – only trees and snow.

The scene comes from Nordstrand near Oslo, where Munch was living at the time. The contrast is extreme: near-black against near-white, with no middle. The snow, however, is not a flat white plane but a reduced net of bluish and grey shadows that only together give the impression of light. It is that restraint which keeps the scene from being a decorative winter view and makes it a cool, exact record of an afternoon. Munch painted winter motifs often, but rarely as strictly as here; this scene is closer to a drawing than to a story.

The support of the original is not canvas but cardboard. Munch often used it for works painted quickly and out of doors, since it was light and could be carried. He laid the colour on dry and in bands, so the texture of the board shows through the paint in places and takes part in the effect of the snow. Our reproduction is made in oil on canvas, like everything on this site; the original technique is given in the table below. The cardboard is also the reason for the particular tone of the scene: its brownish ground warms the whites very slightly, so the snow never turns coldly white.

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 snow, which must stay assembled from cool shadows instead of becoming an empty white plane. As a museum-quality reproduction this motif asks above all for discipline in the lights.

The format lies across and the scene is cool and quiet, so the painting suits a living room, a bedroom, an entrance hall or a room with pale wood. A warm, light wall serves it best and sets the cold of the snow against something; against a cool grey wall the scene merges with its surroundings. Hang it at eye level in even light. Among reproductions of famous paintings this one calms an otherwise colourful room, since the whole of it stands on two values. The horizontal format suits it well above a low chest of drawers or the head of a bed, where it has the full width available.

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 repeats the rhythm of the trunks. More of the artist is in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and painting on the Edvard Munch blog.