Who painted The Scream?

Edvard Munch, and there are several - two paintings, two pastels and a lithograph, made between 1893 and 1910. The figure is not screaming. Munch's own account, written in his diary, describes walking at sunset when the sky turned blood red, feeling an infinite scream passing through nature, and stopping - the figure is hearing a scream and covering its ears.

The red sky may be a real one. One proposal is that it records the sunsets caused by the Krakatoa eruption a decade earlier, which coloured skies worldwide; another is that it depicts nacreous clouds, which occur over Norway and look genuinely alarming. Munch also had a family history of mental illness that he wrote about constantly, and the sky may simply be what he saw.

Two versions have been stolen and recovered, one from the National Gallery in 1994 during the Lillehammer Olympics and one taken off the wall at gunpoint in 2004. The 1994 thieves left a note thanking the gallery for its poor security. One version also carries a pencil inscription in the corner - could only have been painted by a madman - which was long assumed to be vandalism and which handwriting analysis in 2021 concluded was written by Munch himself.