Kiss by the Window

Kiss by the Window is an oil painting on canvas by Edvard Munch, made in 1891 and held by MUNCH, the Munch Museum in Oslo (MM.M.00622, catalogue raisonné Woll M 257); the upright canvas measures 72 × 64.5 cm.

Munch painted it during his first stay in Nice in the south of France. It is the first of the five painted versions of The Kiss recorded in Gerd Woll's catalogue raisonné of his paintings. A year later, during his second stay in Nice, he painted a larger, horizontal version, now in the National Museum in Oslo, in which the couple is moved from the left side of the picture to the right; that 1892 painting was first shown in Kristiania that autumn simply as The Kiss.

Here the couple stands in a dark room at the left, wrapped together into a single dark shape, while most of the canvas is given to the window: pale curtains, glazing bars and a few warm lights outside. The brushwork is loose and streaky throughout, covering walls and floor with short marks. The contrast between the closed, shadowy interior and the lit world beyond the glass recurs across the series, and writers on the 1892 version have compared its blue night mood to Night in Saint-Cloud of 1890.

The kissing couple became one of Munch's most persistent themes. It can be followed from an early drawing called Adieu of 1889–1890 through paintings of 1897, in which the faces of the two lovers dissolve into one another, to woodcuts made as late as 1943. When the Frieze of Life was shown in Berlin in 1902, the 1892 Kiss was one of its earliest works and hung in the first section, headed The Seed of Love.