Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) was born at Ådalsbruk in Løten, Norway, and grew up in Kristiania, now Oslo, where in 1881 he entered the Royal School of Art and Design; the painter Christian Krohg was among his teachers. Illness and bereavement overshadowed his childhood: his mother and his favourite sister both died of tuberculosis. In Paris he learned much from the colour of Gauguin, van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec, and in Berlin, where he met and painted Strindberg, he began the cycle he later called The Frieze of Life, on love, anxiety, jealousy and betrayal. The Scream, conceived in Kristiania, exists in two painted and two pastel versions made between 1893 and 1910, as well as lithographs. He was a prolific printmaker, and his work had a strong influence on the German Expressionists. He spent most of his last two decades in solitude at his estate at Ekely, in Oslo, and left his remaining work to the city. Here: The Scream.