The Scream

Munch wrote of walking at sunset when the sky turned blood red, and of sensing an infinite scream passing through nature. He made the image in two paintings, two pastels and a print; this is the painted version of 1893. The figure is not the one screaming: it hears the scream and holds its head. Two men stole it from the National Gallery in Oslo on the day the 1994 Winter Olympics opened, and the police got it back three months later. A faint pencil line on the sky, "could only have been painted by a madman", was shown in 2021 to be in Munch's own hand.

Medium

Tempera and crayon on cardboard

Size

73.5 x 91 cm

Where

National Museum, Oslo

Photo from Wikimedia Commons, public domain.