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Edvard Munch's Melancholy shows his friend, the writer Jappe Nilssen, slumped on the beach at Åsgårdstrand, sick with love for Oda Krohg, a married woman. Her husband, the painter Christian Krohg, then reviewed the picture in the newspaper Dagbladet and praised it as the first Norwegian painting to embrace symbolism. Munch worked the motif into five paintings between 1891 and 1896, and two woodcuts after that.
Sit with the strangeness of that sequence. A young artist paints his friend's despair over another man's wife. The wronged husband, one of Norway's most established painters, sees the canvas at a public exhibition and celebrates it in print. No scandal follows. No duel, no lawsuit, not even a cold shoulder. The Kristiania art world of 1891 was small, entangled, and defiantly bohemian, and Melancholy is the picture that proves it.
Åsgårdstrand, 1891: The Beach Where the Heartbreak Happened
Åsgårdstrand is a small coastal town on the western shore of the Oslofjord. Munch summered there from 1889, and its curving shoreline, smooth stones, and pale northern evenings became the stage set for much of his art. He would eventually buy a small house there in 1898. In the summer of 1891 the beach hosted a quieter drama: a lovesick friend who could not tear himself away from the water's edge.
The painting compresses that summer into a single image. A male figure sits at the front edge of the picture, head propped in his hand, the classic pose of melancholy that runs back through Dürer's engravings. Behind him, on a jetty, three small figures prepare for a boat trip: a couple, and a man with oars, headed for a yellow boat. The lover watches nothing. He already knows who is in the boat. In the 1892 version, Munch pushed the brooding figure into the lower left corner, so that the eye keeps sliding back to the shoreline, making the landscape carry as much feeling as the face. The muted colors do the rest of the work.
Melancholy, Edvard Munch, 1894. View print options
Jappe Nilssen and Oda Krohg: The Affair Behind the Picture
Jappe Nilssen was a young writer orbiting the Kristiania bohemia, the circle of radical artists and authors who scandalized respectable Norway in the 1880s and 90s. He fell for Oda Krohg, herself a painter and one of the circle's magnetic figures. She was married to Christian Krohg, the leading naturalist painter in the country and a generation older than her admirer. The affair went badly for Nilssen. Munch, watching his friend suffer through that Åsgårdstrand summer, recognized the wound.
He had his own scar to consult. Years earlier Munch had been involved with Milly Thaulow, also married, an experience that marked his art for decades. The slumped figure on the beach is Jappe, but it's Munch too. That doubling explains the motif's alternate titles: Jappe on the Beach, Jealousy, and simply Evening.
Munch kept probing what desire does to the people caught inside it. Les Yeux dans les yeux, painted in 1893, gives us the other side of the coin: two lovers locked eye to eye, sealed inside a closeness that the watcher on the beach is permanently shut out of. Hang the two side by side and you have the whole argument of Munch's love pictures in one glance.
Les Yeux dans les yeux, Edvard Munch, 1893. View print options
Christian Krohg's Review in Dagbladet: The Husband Who Praised It
Munch showed the first Melancholy at the Autumn Exhibition in Kristiania in 1891. Christian Krohg reviewed it for Dagbladet. He did not merely tolerate the picture. He hailed it, declaring it the first Norwegian painting in the spirit of symbolism, a work that painted mood rather than appearances. The husband of the woman at the center of the heartbreak became the painting's first champion in print.
Krohg's generosity was real, and it was also professional judgment. He was a committed naturalist who could see that this younger painter was doing something naturalism could not do: turning a shoreline into an emotion. The endorsement mattered. Munch was still a controversial figure at home, and praise from Krohg carried institutional weight.
The story has a second act that few retellings mention. Jappe Nilssen recovered, became an art critic for Dagbladet himself, and spent the rest of his life as one of Munch's most loyal defenders in the Norwegian press. The heartbroken boy on the beach grew up to review the man who had painted him there.
Five Paintings, Two Woodcuts: A Motif Munch Could Not Put Down
Munch rarely finished with an image. Between 1891 and 1896 he painted Melancholy five times, adjusting the palette, the placement of the figure, the weight of the sky. Between 1896 and 1902 he cut the motif twice into wood. The woodcuts strip the scene to its skeleton: the long grain of the plank reads as water and shore, and the brooding head becomes a dark, simplified mass.
Evening Melancholy I, Edvard Munch, 1896. View print options
Evening Melancholy I from 1896 belongs to this graphic campaign, made during Munch's intensely productive Paris years, and it shows how far he could compress the motif without losing its ache. Repetition served him the way it served earlier artists working a proven vein. Antwerp painters kept a dead master's imagery alive for decades because buyers demanded it, a story we've told in our article on Pieter Huys painting Bosch's demons long after Bosch died. Munch's repetition ran on a different fuel. Nobody commissioned five heartbreaks. He repainted the beach because the feeling wasn't finished with him.
Melancholy vs The Scream: Two Moods of the Frieze of Life
Ask what Munch's Melancholy means and the cleanest answer comes from comparison. Melancholy vs The Scream is stillness against panic. Both belong to the Frieze of Life, Munch's grand cycle on love, anxiety, and death. Both set a lone figure against the Oslofjord. But where The Scream lets the sky howl, a sky we've traced to a possible real event in our piece on the volcanic sunset behind The Scream's blood-red sky, Melancholy swallows its cry. The man says nothing. The shoreline says it for him.
The anxious register of the Frieze got its own dedicated canvas in 1894. Anxiety puts a crowd of pale, staring faces under that same molten sky, dread made public where Melancholy keeps it private. It's the introvert of the Frieze, the picture where emotion turns inward instead of out.
Anxiety, Edvard Munch, 1894. View print options
Munch's radical move, flattening a real coastline into broad bands of feeling, opened a door that twentieth-century painters walked straight through. If that flattening is what grips you, our cubism and abstract art prints collect the artists who pushed it to its logical end.
Where Melancholy Hangs Today, and How to Live With It
The 1892 version of Melancholy hangs in the National Museum of Norway in Oslo, where it anchors the museum's Munch rooms alongside The Scream and Madonna.
At home, the motif behaves differently than you'd expect from its subject. The picture is quiet by design; the muted shoreline reads as calm from a distance and only turns confessional up close. If this picture moved you, two companions belong in the same room. Moonlight on the Sea from 1912 gives you the identical fjord two decades later, after the storm has passed, the water finally at peace.
Moonlight on the Sea, Edvard Munch, 1912. View print options
And Les Yeux dans les yeux, discussed above, completes the triangle: longing, exclusion, and the couple who caused both.
Edvard Munch's originals are under museum glass. Yours can be on your wall this week.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What does Edvard Munch's Melancholy depict?
It shows a man sitting on the beach at Åsgårdstrand with his head propped in his hand, while a couple and a boatman head toward a yellow boat behind him. The figure is Munch's friend Jappe Nilssen, heartbroken over his affair with the married Oda Krohg.
Where can I see the original Melancholy by Munch?
The 1892 version of Melancholy hangs in the National Museum of Norway in Oslo. Munch painted five versions of the motif between 1891 and 1896, so related versions and the woodcuts appear in other collections and exhibitions.
Why did Christian Krohg praise a painting about his own wife's affair?
Krohg reviewed the 1891 version in Dagbladet and hailed it as the first Norwegian symbolist painting. He judged it as an artist, recognizing that Munch had painted mood itself, and the bohemian Kristiania circle treated private entanglements with unusual openness.
How many versions of Melancholy did Munch make?
Munch produced five painted versions between 1891 and 1896, and two woodcuts between 1896 and 1902. Repeating a motif was central to his method, and the Melancholy series shows him refining color, composition, and mood across a decade.
Why is Melancholy important in art history?
It is considered one of the first symbolist paintings by a Norwegian artist and an early cornerstone of Munch's Frieze of Life. By making a landscape express an inner state, it helped open the path toward expressionism in twentieth-century painting.
Julian Mercer
Julian Mercer writes about modern and abstract art for Symbol Art Gallery. He likes the work that refuses to explain itself, and tries to explain it anyway.
