The Girl by the Window
Edvard Munch (Norwegian, 1863–1944)
1893
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 96.5 × 65.4 cm (38 × 25 3/4 in.); Framed: 110.5 × 79.4 × 8.9 cm (43 1/2 × 31 1/4 × 3 1/2 in.)
- Culture
- Norway
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- Searle Family Trust and Goldabelle McComb Finn endowments; Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Standing before a window in the dead of night, a young girl draws back a curtain to gaze at the street from her darkened room. Deep shadows envelop the interior, obscuring all but the suggestion of a rounded piece of furniture at the lower right. The darkness, combined with the sharply tilted floor, gives a sense of precariousness and isolation to the figure. Loosely applied brown, blue, and violet tones enhance the melancholy atmosphere. The window serves as a symbolic barrier, separating the interior from the outside world, but also as a membrane, through which moonlight casts glowing rectangles upon the floor. Although the girl’s actions suggest a narrative, the painting only provides mystery—we cannot see her facial expression, nor what she observes.
Girl by the Window belongs to a group of nocturnal scenes painted by Edvard Munch in the early 1890s, all characterized by moody blue tonalities. Around that time he penned a manifesto in which he declared that artists should depict “living people who breathe and feel, suffer and love.” This focus on the psychological realities of human existence found its ultimate expression in Munch’s iconic work The Scream (1893;…
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
