Starry Night (Munch)

What you are looking at

It is a summer night on the Oslofjord, at the small resort of Åsgårdstrand, where Munch spent his summers from the late 1880s. The view looks down over a curving shore toward still water and a low line of land on the horizon. On the right, a dark, rounded mass of trees fills a third of the canvas, and below it a long white picket fence runs diagonally into the picture. Above, a blue-green sky is scattered with a few stars, and one bright star or planet hangs just above the horizon, its reflection a thin vertical streak in the water below.

The painting is oil on canvas, 135.6 by 140 centimeters, almost square, and belongs to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Looking closely

Munch paints thinly, often leaving the weave of the canvas visible, and he scrubs the sky in broad, uneven strokes of blue so it seems to breathe. The shore is a single sinuous dark curve, the line that runs through many of his Åsgårdstrand pictures, including Melancholy. Two thin vertical lights, one in the trees and one on the water, echo each other across the canvas.

Now look at the white fence at lower right. A faint bluish shape sits on it, a shadow with no obvious source. It is often read as the merged shadow of two figures standing out of sight, a hint of the lovers who appear elsewhere in Munch's work of these years. The reading is suggestive rather than certain, but it turns an empty landscape into a scene of memory and longing.

Meaning and context

In 1893 Munch was living in Berlin among writers and artists who prized mood and inner experience over description, and he was building the cycle of paintings on love, anxiety and death later known as The Frieze of Life. The Scream dates from the same year. Starry Night belongs to that world: a real place, closely observed, charged with private feeling. Accounts of the painting connect the view to the place where Munch first fell in love, which would explain the emotional weight of an apparently quiet night.

Munch returned to the theme of the starry night several times later in his career. The title also invites comparison with Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night of 1889, though the two works are very different: Van Gogh's sky churns, Munch's hangs still.

Where to see it

Starry Night is in the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, one of the most important Munch paintings in an American museum. For more by the artist see Anxiety, Vampire and Edvard Munch.