Edvard Munch – Winter Night

Winter Night

Winter Night by Edvard Munch is an oil painting of 1900, held under inventory number 2204 by the Kunsthaus in Zurich. The original measures 120 x 80 cm and is in landscape format. The scene shows a snow-covered slope with dense dark trees, through which the fjord and the far shore open out.

A pale blue-grey sky occupies the top edge, and below it the opposite shore runs as a narrow band of low snow-covered hills. Along the ridge of that shore runs a distinct reddish-brown line, the only warm accent anywhere in the picture. The middle is taken by a broad plane of fjord in a muted blue-grey, calm and without waves, streaked with lighter passages.

A nearly black row of spruce crosses the middle distance and separates the water from the slope. In the foreground stand large dark masses of tree, painted in blue-black and dark brown-green; the paint is laid on thickly enough that the whorls and turns of the brush stay visible inside it. Left of centre a slender trunk rises in reddish brown, and at the far left a few smaller spruces stand in a brighter green. The snow between the trees is pale blue-white and lilac-white with cold blue shadows, and in the lower left corner a few small bright circles sit in the snow where the brush was twisted.

There is not a single human figure in the painting, which is rare on this shelf: Munch was above all a painter of people, and here he is left alone with trees, snow and water. The winter night motif occupied him for decades and exists in several versions differing in place, format and year; our reproduction follows the one in the Kunsthaus in Zurich, made in 1900. It was in exactly these years that Munch, after the demanding decade of the Frieze of Life, turned more and more to landscape.

The surface is unusually dense for Munch. The dark trees are built with heavier loading, while the water and sky are painted thinly and evenly, so that the difference between them is physical as well as visual. There are no contours; the forms emerge from the difference between tones, and the snow is often simply the lighter underpainting left uncovered.

Ours is a hand-painted oil reproduction, made by a painter in oil on canvas, 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. Among reproductions of famous paintings this is one that gains most from a larger size.

Because the painting is cold and almost entirely blue, it works best against a warm wall: sand, oatmeal or pale timber, which balances the blue. On a white wall it turns slightly hard. Hang it where the viewer can stand back a few paces, since the masses of tree only resolve into individual trees from a distance. It takes daylight well, and also cooler artificial light, which preserves the blues. As a winter motif it sits comfortably with dark wood and textiles in natural colours.

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.