Artwork · 19th century · Edvard Munch

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The Girl by the Window

Edvard Munch1893Oil on canvas96.5 × 65.4 cm

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At a glance

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In a dark room in the middle of the night, a girl in a nightgown pulls back the curtain and looks out of the window.
The Norwegian painter Edvard Munch painted it in oil in 1893.
It comes from the same year as The Scream, and its deep blue night and steeply tilted floor make the room feel lonely and unsteady.

Reading the picture

4 places to look closer

Tap a number on the painting to jump to its note, or a close-up to see that spot in the whole picture.

Zoom in on her head and hand. She grips a fold of the curtain and leans her face toward the window frame. Her face sinks into shadow, so we cannot read her expression. The museum says it plainly: we can see neither her face nor what she is looking at.
Look through the glass. In the blue view outside floats one small square of yellow and pink. It looks like a lit window somewhere across the way. In all that blue night, only that warm light seems to be awake.
Zoom in on the floor. Moonlight comes through the window and drops two pale rectangles onto the boards. The shadow of the window bar splits them. The floor tips sharply toward us, as if the room itself were sliding.
Peer into the darkness at the lower right. A rounded shape is buried in strokes of deep blue, green and brown. The museum reads it as a hint of a piece of furniture. Everything else in the room has been swallowed by the dark.

When it was painted

In 1893 Munch was twenty-nine and living in Berlin. The year before, in November 1892, the Berlin Artists' Association had invited him to show his work. Many members found the paintings crude and shocking, and the exhibition was shut down after about a week.

The scandal made his name in Germany. In 1893 a German art magazine ran an article called The Munch Case, and this painting is mentioned in it. Munch stayed on in Berlin, spending evenings in a tavern with a circle of writers and artists that included the Swedish playwright August Strindberg.

In these years Munch painted a number of night scenes, all sunk in heavy blue. In Night in Saint-Cloud, painted near Paris in 1890, a lone figure sits in a dark room while moonlight throws the shape of the window across the floor. The girl's room feels like a close cousin.

Around that time he wrote in his notes that he would no longer paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. Instead, artists should paint living people who breathe and feel, suffer and love. The same year as this picture, he painted The Scream.

The painting later appeared in the catalogue of works collected by the Oslo art dealer Harold Holst Halvorsen. It entered the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000.

Look again at the bright patches on the floor. The girl is looking out, but the moonlight has already slipped quietly into the room at her feet.

The painter

Edvard Munch

1863–1944

When painting this, the artist was about 30 years old

All paintings by Edvard Munch →

The Girl by the Window

Questions to think about

Look for itCan you find every place in the room where the moonlight lands?
Why?Why do you think Munch hid the girl's face in shadow?
What about you?Have you ever stood at a window alone at night while everyone else slept? These days we often stare at a phone screen instead. How is that different?

Same period