The Scream by Edvard Munch

The Scream by Edvard Munch

The figure at the railing

A figure with a head like a skull stands at the railing of a road that cuts diagonally across the picture, hands pressed to its face, eyes and mouth wide open. Two figures in dark clothes further back along the road take no notice. Below lies the blue-black water of the fjord, and above it a sky streaked with orange, yellow and blood red, the lines of land, water and sky all bending in the same long curves. The place is the Ekeberg hill above what is now Oslo. In Munch’s own account of the moment, the scream belonged to nature itself, and he felt it pass through him.

One of several

Munch made it in tempera and crayon on cardboard. It is one of several versions of the subject: he also drew and painted it in crayon, pastel and tempera, and made it into a lithograph. In the upper left corner of this one, in the red of the sky, a small pencil inscription reads, in Norwegian, “Could only have been painted by a madman”; in 2021 the museum confirmed that the handwriting is Munch’s own. In 1994 the picture was stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo and recovered a few months later.

Where it hangs

It belongs to the National Museum of Norway in Oslo, which opened its new building in 2022, and measures 91 by 73.5 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 8,322-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 55 inches on its longest side.

Sources: National Museum of Norway, Oslo · Wikidata Q18891156 · Wikimedia Commons