The Scream shows what Edvard Munch said he felt on a walk near Oslo: an infinite scream passing through nature, and a man trembling with anxiety in front of it.
Munch wrote the scene down in a diary in Nice on 22 January 1892. He painted a first version, Despair, in 1892, and The Scream itself in 1893.
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In Munch's account, the scream belongs to the sky. But a second voice is written on the painting itself. High in the left corner, in pencil, over the orange clouds, a line in Norwegian reads: Kan kun være malet af en gal Mand. Could only have been painted by a madman. A visitor has to stand very close to read it.
The line was first mentioned in 1904, and for most of the next century nobody could say whose pencil it was. It could be an insult from an angry visitor or a confession from the painter, and the answer changes how the whole picture reads.
What You'll Discover
What happened on that hill.
Why the sky burned red.
Whose face that is.
Who held the pencil.
How it was stolen twice.