Edvard Munch painted this exact scene four separate times. This 1893 version, made in tempera and pastel on cardboard, is the one now held by Norway's National Museum in Oslo.
What you're looking at
A figure stands on a bridge, hands pressed to the sides of its head, mouth open, while the sky behind it swirls in bands of orange and red. Two other people walk calmly away in the background, seemingly unaware of whatever the central figure is experiencing. The wavy, distorted lines running through the sky and water make the whole scene feel like it's vibrating.
A feeling, not a person, screaming
Munch described the source of the image himself, in a diary entry: walking along a road near Kristiania (now Oslo) at sunset with two friends, he felt suddenly overcome with anxiety as the sky turned blood red, and he wrote that he "felt a great scream through nature" — a line close to one he later wrote directly onto the frame of one version of the work. In the painting, the figure isn't screaming out loud so much as reacting to that scream; it isn't a portrait of a person so much as an anxiety attack rendered in color.
This particular 1893 version has its own dramatic history: it was stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo on the morning of February 12, 1994, the same day the Winter Olympics opened in nearby Lillehammer, and was recovered undamaged about three months later, in May 1994.
One detail to look for
Look at the two figures walking calmly away on the bridge behind the central one — usually read as echoing the two friends from Munch's own account, who walked on ahead of him, unaware of what he was feeling. Their calm, upright posture is a deliberate contrast to the central figure's distortion, a reminder that whatever is happening is happening internally, not to the whole scene.
See it at its real size
Our canvas print is labeled against the true size of the original — 91 x 73 cm, held at Norway's National Museum — so what you hang is honestly scaled, not a guess. Shop the canvas print.