Verzweiflung

A man in a dark hat leans on a railing and looks down, while behind him the sky burns in bands of red and orange over a blue fjord. Munch painted this on the Ekeberg hill above Kristiania, today's Oslo, from exactly the spot he used for The Scream. He kept returning to one evening he remembered walking there, when the sky turned blood-red and he felt, as he put it, a great anxiety pass through nature. Here the feeling still belongs to a recognisable person bowed over the rail. In the more famous version the figure loses its face and clothes and becomes the open-mouthed shape everyone knows. The same boats sit at anchor in the water below.