Edvard Munch – The Scream

The Scream

The Scream by Edvard Munch is an expressionist work of 1893, held under inventory number NG.M.00939 by the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 73.5 x 91 cm and is not painted on canvas at all, but in tempera and oil crayon on cardboard. A figure stands on a bridge above the fjord, pressing both hands to its head, its mouth open in a long and soundless cry.

The sky fills the upper third in horizontal bands of red, scarlet and orange-yellow, with short blue-green strokes pushed in between them. Below it the fjord winds in dark blue and near-black curves that turn back on themselves in a long S toward the horizon, and small dark hulls and two masts sit on the water. The bridge cuts the picture on a diagonal from the lower left, its rail drawn in brown, ochre and reddish lines. Two dark upright figures in top hats walk away along that rail in the middle distance, turned from the viewer. The screaming head is yellow-green, the eyes and mouth dark hollows, and the body a wavering blue-black silhouette. In several places, above all along the right edge and in the sky, the cardboard is left bare and its warm sandy tone becomes part of the picture.

The motif exists in four versions, two painted and two in pastel. Our reproduction follows this one, the first painted version of 1893 in the National Museum in Oslo. Munch wrote that he was walking one evening with two friends on the road above the town when the sky turned blood red and he felt an endless scream passing through nature. That account comes from his own diary pages and is the usual frame for reading the picture, though it remains the painter’s own comment rather than an art-historical explanation.

The original is technically unusual. Munch laid tempera and oil crayon onto cardboard, the colour is thin and in places almost dry, and the strokes stay fast and visible. This is why the original is so sensitive to light that the museum rarely shows it for long. Ours is a different object: it is an oil painting on canvas, where the same motif takes on a denser and far more durable surface.

Every order is a hand-painted oil reproduction, built up with a brush, stroke by stroke, in oil on canvas. Nothing is printed and nothing is machine-copied, so no two canvases match down to the detail; the small differences in the paint are the evidence that a hand made it. The photographs beside this description are not images of the museum original but of our own finished painting, taken in the workshop, so that the surface you will receive can actually be seen.

Because the red sky is so strong, the painting sits best on a calm neutral wall – white, grey or sand – where the colour is not competing with its surroundings. Give it a viewing distance: opposite a sofa, or at the end of a hallway, since the bands of the sky resolve into one movement when seen from further back. It takes warm artificial light well in the evening, while direct sun does not suit it. Against dark wood and a black metal edge it reads more severely, against pale oak more gently.

Ten sizes are available, along with a custom size, and every canvas can be ordered framed or unframed. Among our reproductions on canvas you will find more of the artist in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and painting on the Edvard Munch blog.