Edvard Munch

Munch painted the same handful of feelings over and over: jealousy, illness, desire, dread. His mother and sister both died of tuberculosis in his childhood, and the sickroom returns in his work for decades.

The Scream exists in several versions, painted and drawn, and was described by Munch in a diary note as the moment he sensed an infinite scream passing through nature while walking at sunset. The figure is not screaming. It is blocking out the sound.

He worked in Berlin and Paris before a breakdown in 1908, after which the palette brightened and the anguish eased somewhat. The Frieze of Life, his long running sequence on love and death, was never finished as a fixed set. He left over a thousand paintings to the city of Oslo, which he had spent much of his life escaping.