Edvard Munch – Workers in Snow

Workers in Snow

Workers in Snow by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1913, held under inventory number MM.M.00371 by the Munch Museum (Munchmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 197 x 160.5 cm. Three workers walk straight toward the viewer and fill the whole foreground, and behind them snow runs to the top edge.

The worker at the left wears a blue jacket and a dark wide-brimmed hat. His face is a greenish yellow, his eyes dark and his mouth turned down. He holds a shovel upright by a pale wooden handle, its dark blade reaching into the bottom left corner.

At the centre stands the largest figure, a man in a near-black coat and a dark fur hat. His face is a pale grey-white with a moustache and dark hollow eyes, and he stares straight out. His coat is one huge dark mass that holds the middle of the canvas. At the right is a man in a dark greenish-brown coat and a dark wide hat; his face is pale green with a red-orange patch at the mouth, and he holds a shovel with a reddish-brown handle and a grey blade in the bottom right corner.

Behind them is the snow. It fills the whole upper part of the canvas in pale grey-white and blue-white with strokes of pale blue and lilac, laid so thinly that bare canvas shows through in places. At the upper left two small dark figures stand on a slope, one of them bending. Upper right of centre a row of small dark figures runs along a ridge, a distant line of workers. At the right edge a figure in blue crouches and another in dark brown stands with a tool. A brown-ochre band of bare ground runs along the bottom edge.

The three faces in the foreground are masks and all three look straight at you. The workers in the distance are still working; these three have stopped. Munch repeated the motif: the catalogue holds canvases of 1909 and 1910 and fragments of 1931, while ours is the version of 1913 measuring 197 x 160.5 cm. It is also not Workers Returning Home, which this shelf already sells; there the men are walking home off shift, here they are digging.

The handling is broad and dry. The snow is laid thinly in long strokes with the ground left visible between them, so the white is not a smooth plane but something assembled. The figures are built from dark flat masses with no drawing inside them, and the faces are the only really worked passages, in green-yellows and pale tones with strong dark contours. Nowhere do the strokes melt together.

Ours is a hand-painted oil reproduction made in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke, 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. Among reproductions on canvas this motif is demanding in the snow, which has to stay cold and alive at once; smooth the white out and it loses all its depth and turns to paper.

Because the scene is bright and markedly horizontal, the painting needs a long quiet wall and some standing-back room for the three figures to read as a group. The white of the snow wants a warm light ground; against a cold white wall the snow merges with the wall and only the dark figures remain. Hang it at eye level, since all three look straight out and that look only works from in front. The light should be neutral and even, as a yellow lamp tints the snow and takes the winter out of it.

Ten sizes are available from 45 x 38 cm up to 231 x 180 cm, 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.