Good morning.

Today, a man on a bridge at sunset… and the strange detail almost everyone gets backward about who, or what, is actually screaming.

Let’s begin.

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The Sky Was the One Actually Screaming

Edvard Munch—“The Scream”

K	ristiania, Norway. 1892. A young man walked a road above the fjord with two friends. The sun was setting. Without warning, the sky turned blood red.

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) was a Norwegian painter who had already buried his mother and his favorite sister to tuberculosis by the time he was fourteen. He wrote about that walk in his diary the following January: “I felt a wave of sadness… the sky suddenly turned blood-red.”

His two friends walked on ahead. Munch stood still, trembling with anxiety, and sensed, in his own words, an infinite scream passing through nature. He turned that private moment into a painting the following year, 1893.

This is the painting that resulted, arguably the second most recognized human figure in all of Western art, after the Mona Lisa.

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Edvard Munch, “The Scream,” 1893. National Museum of Norway, Oslo.

A gaunt, hairless figure stands on a bridge, hands pressed to the sides of an elongated skull-shaped head, mouth open in a wordless oval. Two ordinary men walk calmly away in the background, seemingly untouched. Behind everyone, the sky churns in bands of orange, red, and yellow.

“I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.”

Edvard Munch, diary entry, January 1892

Here is the detail almost everyone reverses. In Munch’s own German title for the work, Der Schrei der Natur, “The Scream of Nature,” the sky itself is the source of the sound. The figure isn’t screaming. He is covering his ears against a scream coming from somewhere else entirely, bracing against nature rather than producing the noise himself.

Munch returned to the image obsessively for the rest of his life, producing four versions across two decades, plus a lithograph. This is the 1910 tempera version.

Edvard Munch, “The Scream,” 1910 version. Munch Museum, Oslo.

Scientists have since proposed a genuinely physical explanation for that sky. The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, on the far side of the planet, threw enough ash into the upper atmosphere to color sunsets blood-red across Europe for months afterward, well within Munch’s own lifetime and memory.

I used to assume this painting was pure invented nightmare, unconnected to anything real. Reading about Krakatoa changes that. Munch may have been painting an actual sky, filtered through actual grief.

The painting has also been stolen twice. In February 1994, thieves broke into the National Gallery in Oslo, on the opening morning of the Winter Olympics, and left a note reading “thanks for the poor security.” It was recovered three months later. In August 2004, armed robbers pulled a different version straight off the wall of the Munch Museum in broad daylight, in front of museum visitors. That one wasn’t recovered until 2006, damaged but restorable.

A man on a bridge, covering his ears against a sky that wouldn’t stop… stolen twice by people who apparently felt the same urge to reach out and take hold of it.

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Three Things Worth Knowing

I	Le Mot Juste Expressionism

This term describes art that distorts reality on purpose, to convey the artist’s inner emotional state rather than an accurate view of the world. Munch’s work, made a full decade before the movement formally organized itself in Germany, is now treated as one of its founding documents, an emotion made visible before the label existed to describe it.

II	Literature Ibsen’s Circle

Munch moved in the same small, radical Kristiania intellectual scene as the playwright Henrik Ibsen, who reportedly admired Munch’s work and once asked him to design sets for a production of Ghosts. Both artists spent careers dragging Norway’s polite, respectable surface open to show the anxiety and illness underneath it.

III	Philosophy Existential Dread

Munch read Kierkegaard and moved among the Kristiania Bohemians, a circle of radical thinkers including Hans Jæger, an early figure in what later became existentialist philosophy. Their central claim was blunt: confronting the meaninglessness of existence directly, rather than hiding from it, was the only honest way to live. This painting looks like the exact moment that confrontation actually arrives.

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Connoisseur’s Diary

Worth Seeing This Week

The 1893 painting from today’s issue is on permanent display at the National Museum of Norway, in a dedicated Munch room built to manage the crowds.

Where: Brÿnnsveien 9, 0166 Oslo, Norway. Tickets: standard adult admission runs around 230 NOK; check the museum’s site for current pricing. Insider tip: the museum rotates which version of the painting is on view, since light exposure damages the fragile pastel and tempera medium; check ahead if seeing this specific 1893 version matters to you. Plan a visit at nasjonalmuseet.no →

Worth Reading

Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream — Sue Prideaux (2005). The first full English-language biography, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

The Private Journals of Edvard Munch — ed. J. Gill Holland. A translated selection from Munch’s own diaries, including the entry describing the walk behind this painting.

Explore Further

“Why is ‘The Scream’ screaming?”, TED-Ed. Watch →

Watch: Sotheby’s own video on the painting’s history and thefts. Watch on YouTube →

Browse: the Munch Museum’s own digital archive hosts high-resolution scans of Munch’s diaries, letters, and prints, free to browse at emunch.no.

Test Your Knowledge

1According to Munch’s own German title, what is actually making the scream in the painting?

Nature itself, not the figure in the foreground

The two men walking away in the background

A ship’s horn sounding somewhere on the fjord

Answer: Nature itself. The figure is covering his ears against the scream, not producing it.

2What real-world event has been proposed to explain the painting’s blood-red sky?

The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, which reddened skies across Europe

A large forest fire burning near Kristiania that week

A total solar eclipse visible from Norway that year

Answer: The 1883 Krakatoa eruption. Volcanic ash in the upper atmosphere colored sunsets blood-red across Europe for months, well within Munch’s memory.

3How many times has a version of “The Scream” been stolen?

Twice, in 1994 and again in 2004

Once, and it has never been recovered

Never; security has held for its entire history

Answer: Twice. The 1994 theft included a note thanking the museum for its poor security.

If the links above don’t respond in your email app, just reply with your answers—I’ll write back.

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That’s all for today.

Tomorrow, we leave the gallery for a stage two thousand years old… and a comedy built entirely around a sex strike.

In good taste,

Charles T. Mayfair

Editor, Connoisseur Daily