Meet the Mysterious and Brooding Norwegian Painter Responsible for ‘The Scream’

The Scream, Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting, is one of the most iconic compositions in Western art. Beneath a red sky, on a path with guardrails overlooking a swirling fjord, a sinuous man in all black, his hands raised in horror to his bald and skeletal head, screams.

Munch recalled the experience that inspired his painting in his private journals. “One evening I was walking out on a hilly path near Kristiania—with two comrades,” he wrote, using the old name for Oslo. “It was a time when life had ripped my soul open. The sun was going down—had dipped in flames below the horizon … I felt a great scream—and I heard, yes, a great scream.”

The Scream has become synonymous with its artist and his troubled, anxious personal life. But Munch, born in Løten, Norway, on this day in 1863, was far more prolific and significant than a single painting, no matter how renowned.

“Upon his death in 1944, at the age of 80,” Arthur Lubow wrote for Smithsonian, “the authorities discovered—behind locked doors on the second floor of his house—a collection of 1,008 paintings, 4,443 drawings and 15,391 prints, as well as woodcuts, etchings, lithographs, lithographic stones, woodcut blocks, copperplates and photographs.”

Personal tragedy drove much of Munch’s prolific artistic production. His mother and eldest sister both died of tuberculosis while he was still young. Though he enrolled in technical college in 1879, struggles with illness and mental health kept his attendance spotty.

In his diary, he noted that he was beginning his first painting of an old church in May 1880. By November, he had dropped out of technical college and “made up my mind to become a painter,” attending evening courses at the School of Drawing in Oslo.

Munch was influenced early on by Naturalism. But he later came to adopt a more “developed … psychologically charged and expressive style to transmit emotional sensation,” Lubow wrote, a style that better reflected his personal struggle and came to define his artistic output.

In The Sick Child—first painted in 1886, when he was just 23, and revisited in other versions and forms throughout his life—Munch depicts his older sister dying of tuberculosis as his aunt mourns by her side. Death in the Sickroom, painted seven years later, shows his family suffering together in a sparse, sickening, orange-and-green room.

Women feature prominently in much of his work. Some, like Morning and Inger Munch in Black, are aesthetic studies that play with contrast, couching one subject in early light and enveloping the other in a black dress and background.

In many of his paintings of women, however, Munch both explored his relationships and reduced women to the source of his anguish.

The end of his first relationship inspired Vampire (or Love and Pain), a charged depiction of a kiss on the neck. Woman from 1925, also known as Woman in Three Stages, shows desire, detachment and death on the same canvas while a man throbs with pain off to the side. Different versions of the nude Madonna might show a ghastly object of both fear and desire, or a liberated subject.

“Munch repeatedly emphasized that his pictures fitted together ‘like the pages of a diary,’” biographer Sue Prideaux wrote in Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream. “All his works are fragments of a great confession.”

His self-portraits—his mysterious and smoky 1895 Self-Portrait With a Cigarette and his tortured 1903 Self-Portrait in Hell, for instance—perhaps best exemplify his deep personal conflict and self-exploration over the decades of his career.

Self-Portrait. Between the Clock and the Bed is one of his last works, finished in 1943. It shows an elderly, silent Munch trapped between two symbols of death. A room full of his artworks, which he insistently called his “children,” is behind him. “Like a devoted parent,” Lubow wrote, “he sacrificed everything for them.”

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Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.