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Lot Essay
Der Märchenwald (The Fairytale Forest) is Edvard Munch's final realisation of a theme that he first began around 1900-1901, in which he sought to convey the mysterious aura of a dark cathedral-like forest and its mesmerizing effect on a group of young children.
Reminiscent in some respects of the same kind of mystery that Munch sought to express in another repeated subject at this time - that a group of young girls on a bridge - the artist's interest in his paintings of the Märchewald or 'fairytale forest' derives from a specific experience Munch had around this time, and which he described in one of his diaries.
'In the mornings I went to the forest, first along the path with the small peaceful houses along either side - in the gardens with their blooming cherry trees and flowers and greenery - there I greeted all the sweet little children whose voices were like a fresh drink for my sick soul, their large eyes, a beautiful, lost world, where I myself once used to be. Their graceful Spring-like movements were a joy to behold. The little girls, how like women they were, and the boys, how like men. The little girls - shy but also cheeky, charming and funny - strutting around according to the laws of Nature. And then came the forest - the young children's forest - light green branches like church steeples, climbing higher and stronger until the forest stood like a huge cathedral, trunk upon trunk, column upon column while the birds played the music' (Edvard Munch, 'Tgebuch,' quoted in Edvard Munch, Sein Werk in Schweizer Sammlungen, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Basel, 1985, p. 58).
In Der Märchenwald, Munch returned to the theme which had been the subject of at least three paintings from 1901-2 and combined these with that of another series of pictures, entitled Dunkler Tannenwald ('Dark Spruce Forest'), that had occupied him in 1899. Fusing these two repeated themes of his work, Der Märchenwald draws on the encounter between the children and the vast dark spruce forest Munch had witnessed so many years before, as a way of invoking a similar sense of both the sublime mystery of the forest and of the psychological awakening it aroused in the children. In this, as its title suggests, Der Märchenwald is like an image from Grimm's fairytales, where the great dark Nordic forest often played a similar role. Showing the children descending into the foreground, this painting, with its Caspar David Friedrich-like contrast in scale between the small individual figures of the awe-struck children and the vast cathedral-like forest, uses the landscape, like so many of Munch's great works, as a powerful and emotive expression of a particular stage of life.
Reminiscent in some respects of the same kind of mystery that Munch sought to express in another repeated subject at this time - that a group of young girls on a bridge - the artist's interest in his paintings of the Märchewald or 'fairytale forest' derives from a specific experience Munch had around this time, and which he described in one of his diaries.
'In the mornings I went to the forest, first along the path with the small peaceful houses along either side - in the gardens with their blooming cherry trees and flowers and greenery - there I greeted all the sweet little children whose voices were like a fresh drink for my sick soul, their large eyes, a beautiful, lost world, where I myself once used to be. Their graceful Spring-like movements were a joy to behold. The little girls, how like women they were, and the boys, how like men. The little girls - shy but also cheeky, charming and funny - strutting around according to the laws of Nature. And then came the forest - the young children's forest - light green branches like church steeples, climbing higher and stronger until the forest stood like a huge cathedral, trunk upon trunk, column upon column while the birds played the music' (Edvard Munch, 'Tgebuch,' quoted in Edvard Munch, Sein Werk in Schweizer Sammlungen, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Basel, 1985, p. 58).
In Der Märchenwald, Munch returned to the theme which had been the subject of at least three paintings from 1901-2 and combined these with that of another series of pictures, entitled Dunkler Tannenwald ('Dark Spruce Forest'), that had occupied him in 1899. Fusing these two repeated themes of his work, Der Märchenwald draws on the encounter between the children and the vast dark spruce forest Munch had witnessed so many years before, as a way of invoking a similar sense of both the sublime mystery of the forest and of the psychological awakening it aroused in the children. In this, as its title suggests, Der Märchenwald is like an image from Grimm's fairytales, where the great dark Nordic forest often played a similar role. Showing the children descending into the foreground, this painting, with its Caspar David Friedrich-like contrast in scale between the small individual figures of the awe-struck children and the vast cathedral-like forest, uses the landscape, like so many of Munch's great works, as a powerful and emotive expression of a particular stage of life.