Description
Workers Returning Home
Workers Returning Home by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1920 that carries inventory number NG.M.02819 at the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) in Oslo. It measures 138.5 x 79.5 cm and shows a crowd of workers in caps and dark coats surging straight towards the viewer and filling the whole width of the canvas. The front figures are large and dark; those behind shrink quickly until, in the distance, they are no more than short vertical strokes. A factory with a tall chimney stands at the right, a latticed pylon rises into the sky at the left, and low hills run along behind them. The canvas is signed and dated: E.Munch 1920.
The motif occupied the painter for years. The well-known large version, roughly 201 x 227 cm, is in the Munch Museum; our source is the smaller canvas in the National Museum, its own museum record and its own work rather than a copy of that one. The worker subject entered Munch’s painting after 1909, when he returned to Norway and began working on large public commissions.
What is unusual is the direction of movement: the column does not pass the viewer but comes straight at him, so that it seems about to step out of the picture in the next moment. The faces are barely indicated and most lie in the shadow of a cap; what carries the scene is not any individual but the shared weight of the stride.
Our reproduction is hand-painted throughout in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke and always to order; it is not a print. Because every canvas is made individually, tones and strokes differ slightly from one copy to the next.
The format is low and very wide, so the painting works excellently above a long sofa, a sideboard or a desk, where an upright format would be impossible. Its palette of bluish greys, dirty whites and dark browns sits well with concrete, metal and dark wood; in a light minimal room it reads as the one strong piece of content on the wall.
It is available in ten sizes, from a smaller horizontal format to a very wide canvas, and we can also make it to a size you specify. Other works by the same artist are among the paintings of Edvard Munch, and his life and work are covered in the biography of Edvard Munch.
| Year: | 1920 |
| Original size: | 138.5 cm x 79.5 cm |
| Style: | Expressionism |
| Original technique: | Oil on canvas |
| Located at: | National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet), Oslo |
