Edvard Munch

One evening in the early 1890s Munch was walking a road above the Kristiania fjord, the old name for Oslo, with two friends when the sky over the water turned blood-red. He wrote in his diary that he stopped, trembling, and felt an endless scream pass through nature. Out of that walk came The Scream, painted in 1893. Astronomers have since argued the red sky was real, an afterglow from the eruption of the volcano Krakatoa in 1883 that tinted sunsets across the world for months.

He had reasons to see dread in an ordinary sunset. His mother and his older sister Sophie both died of tuberculosis while he was a boy, and illness and breakdown followed him for decades. In 1908 he checked himself into a Copenhagen clinic after a collapse. He turned all of it into pictures of jealousy, sickness, and anxiety that he grouped under the title The Frieze of Life.

By the 1930s his fame was wide enough that the Nazi government pulled 82 of his works from German museums as degenerate art. He spent his last years outside occupied Norway's capital, on his estate at Ekely, guarding the thousands of paintings and prints he had kept for himself. He died there in January 1944 at 80, and left almost his entire private collection to the city of Oslo.