Melancholy

Melancholy from 1900 belongs to a series of works Munch made across two decades depicting a male figure seated in dejection at the shoreline — a motif that originated with his painter friend Jappe Nilssen and became one of his most sustained explorations of masculine psychological suffering, longing, and unrequited desire. The figure at the water's edge — surrounded by the indifferent beauty of the Norwegian summer landscape while sunk in inner anguish — was Munch's most direct image of the condition he called 'jealousy' or 'melancholy,' the state of desire thwarted by circumstance. The Munch Museum holds this 1900 version as part of its comprehensive collection of the Melancholy motif across its various treatments.

Munch uses the contrast between the subjectively compressed space around the melancholy figure and the expansive landscape behind him to convey the dissociation between inner suffering and outer world. The figure is rendered in dark, heavy tones while the landscape is given a summer beauty appropriate to the cruelty of the contrast.