The archive / Expressionism / The Scream
The Scream
Edvard Munch · 1863–1944
3 variations + a matched story print, every standard frame ratio. sRGB · up to 300 DPI · personal-use license.
Print it your way — at home, a local shop, or a gallery print delivered to your door. See the printing guide →
Sizes in the download
Print-ready files at every standard frame ratio below — the full image, nothing cropped:
The print is crisp at 300 DPI up to about 18×24″, and stays sharp at 150 DPI from across the room, out to about A0.
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The work
A scream Munch heard pass through nature.
A figure presses its hands to its skull while two passersby keep walking behind it — the image that became the world's shorthand for anxiety. Munch reworked an earlier 1892 composition into this 1893 painting, the version now held by Norway's National Museum. It marks his turn from Symbolism, art of suggestive emblems, toward Expressionism, art that bends the visible to feeling. He returned to the motif again and again: four versions, two painted and two in pastel, plus a lithograph.
Look closer
Two riddles hidden in the surface.
Read the upper left and a tiny pencil line appears: "Can only have been painted by a madman." Infrared analysis led the National Museum to confirm Munch wrote it himself. Near the figure's shoulder sit small white spots, long taken for bird droppings. Synchrotron X-ray analysis, which reads a material by the light it scatters, found something stranger. They are wax.
Why it matters
The painting the world tried to take.
Thieves came on the opening day of the 1994 Winter Olympics, while the world watched Norway. They took this 1893 version straight off the wall of the National Gallery in Oslo. It surfaced again later that same year, recovered and returned.
One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord – the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream.— Edvard Munch, diary entry headed 'Nice 22 January 1892'
The file & the facts
- Title
- The Scream
- Artist
- Edvard Munch
- Year
- 1893
- Medium
- Oil, tempera & pastel on cardboard
- Original
- 91 × 73.5 cm
- Collection
- National Museum of Norway
- Rights
- Public-domain painting · Reproduction: Nasjonalmuseet (National Museum of Norway), NG.M.00939 — CC BY 4.0
- File
- sRGB · JPEG · 150–300 DPI
