There isn't one Scream. Munch made at least four.
Edvard Munch made two painted versions of The Scream, two in pastel and a lithograph for prints. Both paintings have been stolen and recovered. And a tiny pencilled line on the first one, 'could only have been painted by a madman', turns out to be in Munch's own hand.
Munch described the moment behind it in his diary: walking at sunset on a road above the fjord at Oslo, he saw the clouds turn blood red and sensed 'an infinite scream passing through nature'. The German title under which it was first shown was The Scream of Nature. Some scholars think he was describing a panic attack. The spot has been identified as the hill of Ekeberg, near the asylum where his sister Laura was a patient.
Why is the sky so orange? One popular theory is the memory of the Krakatoa eruption, which reddened sunsets in the 1880s, but many scholars dispute it, pointing out that Munch was expressive rather than literal. Others suggest nacreous clouds, which can appear at Norway's latitude. The skeletal figure may have been inspired by a Peruvian mummy displayed in Paris in 1889.
Munch returned to the image repeatedly: the first painting in 1893, a pastel the same year, another pastel in 1895, a lithograph stone in 1895 from which around four dozen prints were pulled, and a second painting in 1910. In 1994, thieves took the National Gallery's version on the opening day of the Lillehammer Olympics, leaving a note thanking the gallery for its poor security. In 2004, masked gunmen took the 1910 version from the Munch Museum. Both were recovered.
The pencil inscription on the 1893 painting was long assumed to be a critic's jibe. Infrared study of the handwriting showed Munch wrote it himself, perhaps after hostile reviews in 1895 wounded a man acutely aware of mental illness in his family. In 2012 the 1895 pastel sold for nearly 120 million dollars, then a record for a work at public auction.
Source: Wikipedia — The Scream · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
