Edvard Munch - The Scream

Edvard Munch (1863-1944), the Norwegian artist who was born in Oslo, had a hard life when he was young.  Death and illness seemed to surround him.  At five, he lost his mother (to tuberculosis); at 14, he lost his favorite sister (Sophie); at 25, he lost his father.  Soon thereafter Laura, his sister, lost her mind and was committed to an asylum.  His painting, The Scream, seems a way to sum-up what he must have been feeling through it all.

He actually tells us how the painting came about - in 1893:

I was walking along a path with two friends—the sun was setting—suddenly the sky turned blood red—I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence—there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city—my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety—and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

As a young artist, searching for meaning, Munch discovered the Russian writer Dostoevsky.  Of him, Edvard said:

No one in art has yet penetrated as far [as Dostoevsky] into the mystical realms of the soul, towards the metaphysical, the subconscious ...

Dostoevsky, of course, had a profound reason for serious soul-searching.  He had once been sentenced to death, by firing squad.  After he was in position, waiting for the bullet to strike him, he was reprieved - at the last second - by the Tsar himself (who had never intended for the condemned young men to die).

Munch painted several versions of The Scream.  One was stolen, in 1994, and recovered (undamaged) three months later.  Another was stolen, at gunpoint, from the Edvard Munch Museum, in 2004.

Click on the image for a better view.