Sam Preston

This is one of the most famous paintings in the world, but what the artist was actually trying to capture is very different from what most people assume... The Scream was made by Edvard Munch in 1893. At first glance, it appears to show someone screaming in terror. But a closer look at those hands tells a very different story. They’re pressed against the ears, and the face almost looks like it’s trying to block something out. And Munch’s original title gives us a clue as to what that something might be. In German, he called it Der Schrei der Natur — The Scream of Nature. The scream isn’t coming from him. It’s coming from the world around him. He’s just the only one who can hear it... He described exactly where it came from in a diary entry that is one of the most haunting things an artist ever wrote about his own work: "I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun was setting. Suddenly the sky turned blood red. I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence. There was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city. My friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety. And I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature." That is the real subject of the painting: not a monster, not a nightmare, but a moment many people know, when the ordinary world suddenly turns strange and hostile, and a wave of dread rolls through everything, and you feel utterly alone in it because the people beside you feel nothing. Munch was painting the sensation of anxiety itself. And there is one more thing, a secret hidden in the paint for over a century. In the top left corner, in tiny pencil letters, someone had written in Norwegian, "Could only have been painted by a madman." For a hundred years no one knew who. In 2021 the National Museum of Norway used infrared scanning and compared the handwriting to Munch's diaries and letters, and confirmed it was Munch himself. He wrote it on his own masterpiece, most likely a bitter, wounded answer to those who had dismissed him as insane. Munch spent his whole life turning that inner darkness into art, and he said plainly what he was really painting all along: he called it "the study of the soul."