Edvard Munch made the first version of *The Scream* (tempera and oil on cardboard) in Oslo in 1893. Munch describes the scene's source in his diary: walking with friends along the Oslo Fjord, the sunset turned the sky into a red 'as if washed with blood'; as his friends walked on, Munch leaned exhausted against the railing and heard 'an infinite scream passing through nature'. The figure on the canvas is not Munch himself but a gelatinous being stopping its ears against that scream.

The composition is built on a few strong diagonals. The edge of the bridge in the foreground sweeps off to the right; the horizontals of the fjord and the waves of the red-orange sky behind set up a counter-rhythm. The two figures further back walk normally — the foreground figure alone seems completely cut off from the world. Colour is not symbolic but effectual: red for threat, grey for inertness, green for nausea; in his own notes Munch wrote, 'I am not painting the colours of nature but the colours of my soul.'

There are four main versions (1893 tempera, 1895 pastel, 1895 lithograph, 1910 repainting). The pastel version sold at auction in 2012 for $119.9 million, one of the records of the time. The 1893 version is at the National Museum in Oslo; the 1910 version is at the Munch Museum.

Munch's *Scream* is often called the first visual expression of modern anxiety. In the same years as Schopenhauer's will, Kierkegaard's despair, and the proto-Freudian theories of the unconscious — and before all of them — it said it visually.