Despair (Sick Mood at Sunset)

Munch painted this in 1892, from a memory he had already written down. Walking at sunset along a road above Kristiania, the city now called Oslo, with two friends, he felt a wave of dread as the sky suddenly went blood-red over the fjord. Here a man in a dark hat leans on the railing of that road, turned away from us, while the sky burns in bands behind him and the walkway drops off at a steep diagonal. The red sky, the railing, the plunging path are all here a year before he reused them in The Scream. Munch later pointed back to this canvas as the first version of that idea. In his account his friends walked on ahead while he stayed behind, trembling.