Attribution · analysis · art history
Is The Scream by Van Gogh? Munch, origin and analysis
No: The cry is by Edvard Munch. But the confusion reveals a real relationship between two artists who made color, line and landscape the instruments of an inner emotion.
Article verified on July 14, 2026 · Sources: MUNCH, Nasjonalmuseet and Van Gogh Museum.
Immediate response
The painting is not by Van Gogh - and this detail changes his entire reading
Assigning the work correctly is not about reciting a name. This places the image in Norse symbolism, the Friesland cycle of life, and Munch's personal research into anxiety.
Edvard Munch creates the first painted version of the Scream in 1893. Vincent van Gogh died on July 29, 1890, almost three years earlier. The chronology is therefore sufficient to exclude attribution, but it does not cancel any relationship between the artists.
Munch, born in 1863, discovered Van Gogh's work around 1890 and became a deep admirer of the Dutch painter. The two men probably never met. However, they share a modern ambition: to no longer use color to only imitate the visible world, but to make an inner experience perceptible.
Contemporary confusion also comes from our way of grouping famous images. The spirals of Starry Night, the yellow skies of Van Gogh and the red curves of Scream have become symbols of "emotional" painting. However, their techniques, their trajectories and their subjects remain distinct.
Birth of Van Gogh
Vincent was born in the Netherlands and began his artistic career late.
Birth of Munch
Edvard Munch was born in Norway, ten years after Van Gogh.
Death of Van Gogh
Munch discovered his work around this period and admired it.
The text and Despair
The experience of landscape first takes shape in a poem and a preparatory motif.
The cry
The frontal silhouette replaces the man in profile and makes the image immediately universal.
Before the image, text
A walk, a red sky and "an infinite cry through nature"
The motif was not born from an improvised gesture in front of the canvas. Munch wrote it, drew it, took it up and transformed it for several years.
In a text dated 1892, Munch recounts a walk with two friends at sunset. The sky turns blood red, the city and the fjord appear blue-black, the friends continue on their way while the artist stops, trembling with anguish. He doesn't just say that a character lets out a cry: he feels a cry crossing nature.
This nuance explains the central ambiguity. The figure opens its mouth, but it also brings its hands to its ears. It can scream, hear the cry of the landscape, or become the sounding board of a sensation that abolishes the boundary between human beings and the world.
In 1892, Munch painted Despair, with an identifiable man wearing a hat and coat. The landscape, the two walkers and the undulating sky are already present. In 1893, the figure turned around in front of the viewer and lost age, gender and social identity. It is this radical simplification which gives the motif its power.
"My friends continued, and I stood there, trembling with anguish - I felt the loud cry in nature."Edvard Munch, text of the Cree, 1892 - synthetic translation
Anatomy of an icon
How Munch transforms a real landscape into a sound wave
The strength of the painting comes from a simple opposition: the road and the balustrade resist, while the sky, the water and the body begin to undulate.
The diagonal of the bridge
The balustrade starts from the foreground and suddenly flees towards the two walkers. It draws the eye in depth but also isolates the face, stuck against the edge.
The frontal figure
Neither a precise portrait nor realistic anatomy, it resembles a mask, a skull or an embryo. This indeterminacy allows each spectator to project themselves into it.
The two friends
They continue to walk, straight and almost indifferent. Their stability makes the solitude of the character more acute, who can no longer follow the ordinary rhythm.
The red sky
Orange bands do not accurately describe a sunset. They take the form of flames or waves and give a physical color to the alarm.
The blue-black fjord
The curve of the water follows that of the sky and the face. Nature is no longer a setting behind emotion: it participates in the same movement.
The cardboard visible
The technique seems quick and fragile. Reserves, lines and thin surfaces reveal the support, which keeps the image in a state of emergency.
Is the character really screaming?
The French title encourages this reading, but Munch's text shifts the action towards the environment. Hands on ears suggest that he is trying to protect himself from an external or internal cry. The work remains open: it is precisely this refusal to decide which allows him to represent anxiety without visible cause.
A pattern, not a single canvas
Four colorful versions and one image multiplied by the print
Munch often used his patterns. Differences in support, color and line make Scream a living series rather than an original followed by copies.
Painting of Nasjonalmuseet
Tempera and grease pencil on cardboard
Considered the first painted version; given to the museum by Olaf Schou in 1910.
Drawing kept in MUNCH
Pencil on cardboard
A graphic version that shows the pattern's ability to work with drier material.
Pastel in private collection
Pastel on cardboard
Colorful version accompanied by a variation of the text on its frame.
Painting preserved in MUNCH
Tempera and oil on unprepared cardboard
This version was stolen in 2004 and then found in 2006; it remains extremely fragile.
Lithograph
Black and white printing, sometimes colored
Around thirty proofs are estimated. The printed rehearsal prepared the way for the worldwide distribution of the motif.
True kinship
Van Gogh and Munch: same expressive urgency, two pictorial languages
They are often brought together because they have moved painting from appearance to experience. But one models the world through matter, the other simplifies it to the sign.
Matter makes nature active
In Van Gogh, impasto, directional touches and complementary contrasts give the sky, cypresses or fields visible energy. Painting retains a strong material presence: each brushstroke remains an event.
The line transforms the world into a symbol
Munch often favors silhouettes, flat areas and continuous curves. Face, sky and shore become elements of the same emotional alphabet. The image seems simple because it eliminates any detail that does not serve the psychic state.
Which brings them together
- A non-naturalistic color used to express intensity.
- A landscape that reflects or amplifies the inner state.
- Self-portraits used as a laboratory of technique and identity.
- An interest in universal themes: solitude, love, death, consolation and nature.
- A major influence on the expressionists of the 20th century.
What sets them apart
- Van Gogh belongs to post-impressionism; Munch comes from symbolism and becomes a pioneer of expressionism.
- Van Gogh's thick, fragmented touch differs from Munch's large curves and flatter surfaces.
- Van Gogh often works in front of an observed motif; Munch takes images from memory for a long time.
- The Scream place a sign figure in the center; Van Gogh's landscapes can carry emotion without character.
- Munch had a long career until 1944; Van Gogh's focused on a decade.
Three visual dialogues to observe
Anxiety
The sky of Scream returns above a head-on crowd. Close faces create no community: isolation becomes collective.
The Night Café
Van Gogh contrasts red and green to produce an oppressive atmosphere. Emotion arises here from a social interior rather than a sign figure.
The Sick Child
The rubbed and recaptured surface not only describes a chamber. It shows the fragmentary nature of a painful memory.
Bandaged ear self-portrait
Van Gogh does not paint a disorderly explosion: he presents himself standing, concentrated, affirming through work the continuity of his identity as an artist.
Vampire
The embrace can be consoling or predatory. As in The cry, Munch constructs an open image whose title directs without exhausting the meaning.
Road with cypress and star
The road, the cypress and the sky are all driven by curves. But Van Gogh retains the density of the place and the resistance of the painted material.
Five keys to comparing without confusing
1. Color no longer fills objects
In both works, color ceases to be mere descriptive information. The sky of Scream isn't red just because the sun sets: it becomes a warning layer that runs across the entire scene. In Starry Night, deep blue and luminous yellows construct a nocturnal space animated by contrasts. Munch tends towards large continuous, almost emblematic areas; Van Gogh fragments the surfaces into touches which preserve the trace of the hand. An intense palette therefore brings them together, but its implementation reveals two different thoughts.
2. Rhythm organizes emotion
Perhaps the most fruitful resemblance lies in movement. The curves of the sky, the fjord and the figure respond to each other in Munch like the swirls of the sky, the branches and the hills in Van Gogh. However, the Scream contrast these undulations with the dry diagonal of the footbridge: space seems to be torn between order and panic. Van Gogh distributes his rhythm more often throughout the landscape. At home, the gaze circulates; at Munch, he suddenly returns to the central face and his defensive gesture.
3. Support is part of the meaning
The 1893 version of the Scream combines tempera and grease pencil on cardboard whose fragility is today decisive for conservation. The thin areas and visible lines give the image a dry tension, very different from the impastos associated with Van Gogh. This frequently constructs a relief of paint that catches the light and makes the surface almost tactile. A convincing reproduction must respect this difference: it should not automatically transform Munch into thick paint or smooth Van Gogh's directional touch.
4. Biography is not a total explanation
Popular stories readily bring the two artists together through psychological suffering. This reading can open a door, but it becomes misleading if it reduces the paintings to symptoms. Munch designed, took up and distributed his motif for years; Van Gogh studied prints, color theory, old masters and innovations of his time. Their expressiveness comes from conscious work on composition, format, color and series. Their expressiveness comes from conscious work on composition, format, color and series. Their expressiveness comes from conscious work on composition, format, color and series. Seeing only the crisis makes the method, visual culture and technical decisions disappear which give the works their lasting power.
5. Influence is not an encounter
Munch and Van Gogh probably never met. The Norwegian nevertheless discovered his elder's work around 1890 and admired it, at the very moment when his own painting was moving away from naturalism. He does not copy a precise painting: he recognizes in Van Gogh the possibility of using landscape and color as vehicles for an inner experience. The history of art often advances in this way, through delayed gaze, exhibition, reproduction and memory. Their relationship is therefore real without making their styles interchangeable.
What this comparison changes
An exact attribution does not destroy the intuition that brought people together The cry by Van Gogh; she makes it more precise. We understand that modern expression does not have a single grammar. It can arise from matter and touch, or from simplification and symbol; inhabiting a landscape without character or concentrating in a frontal silhouette. Comparing then amounts to observing how each artist transforms a sensation into a visual construction, rather than looking for which one would have painted the most tormented image.
Unravel the truth from the spectacular
Four preconceived ideas that prevent us from seeing the picture
Tormented biographies attract, but they do not replace chronology or analysis of forms.
"Van Gogh painted The Scream"
Munch is the author. The Nasjonalmuseet version dates from 1893, three years after Van Gogh's death.
"The character screams"
He can also cover his ears in the face of the cry of nature. The 1892 text deliberately maintains this ambiguity.
"There is only one original"
Munch produced four colored versions and a lithograph. Repetition is part of his practice, as for several reasons in the Frieze of Life.
"Madness explains genius"
The image is the result of prolonged work: text, sketches, Despair, figure changes and technical repetitions. Suffering does not replace artistic construction.
See The Scream in Oslo
Two museums, several versions and closely monitored conservation
The motif can be seen at the National Museum and MUNCH. Always check the hanging, as works on paper and cardboard must be protected from light.
The painted version from 1893
The first painted version is presented in the room dedicated to Munch, unless ready or necessary for conservation. It was stolen in 1994 then recovered the same year. Its fragile support requires low lighting.
Consult the official sheetPainting, drawing and lithographs
MUNCH retains eight completed versions: a painting, a drawing and six lithographs. One version is still on display in the presentation Infinite, while the others rest in the dark according to a rotation system.
See exhibition conditionsExplore both universes
Ten works to extend the comparison
Munch's paintings develop the themes of the Frieze of Life; those of Van Gogh allow us to compare expressive color, night and animated landscape.
Anxiety
Discover the workThe Sick Child
Discover the workVampire
Discover the work
Separation
Discover the work
Jealousy
Discover the work
Self-portrait with a cigarette
Discover the workStarry Night
Discover the workThe Night Café
Discover the workRoad with cypress and star
Discover the workBandaged ear self-portrait
Discover the workStore collections
Expressionism, symbolism, Munch and Van Gogh
Explore the artists, movements and atmospheres that illuminate the two works without confusing them.
Frequently asked questions
The Scream, Van Gogh and Munch: precise answers
Attribution, meaning, versions and exhibition locations.
Was The Scream painted by Van Gogh?
Why is The Scream often attributed to Van Gogh?
How many versions of The Scream are there?
Who is the character depicted in The Scream?
Does the character scream or cover his ears?
Where can we see The Scream today?
Did Munch know Van Gogh?
Which painting to choose between The Scream and Starry Night?
Main sources
- Nasjonalmuseet, The Scream - 1893 version sheet, materials, dimensions and history.
- MUNCH, The Scream - colored versions, lithographs and pattern text.
- MUNCH, 5 things you should know - written genesis and conservation.
- MUNCH, Where can I see The Scream? - rotation of exposed versions.
- Nasjonalmuseet, inscription of the "madman" - infrared and graphological study.
- Van Gogh Museum, Munch and Van Gogh - admiration, parallels and improbable encounter.
- MUNCH, Van Gogh + Munch exhibition - universal themes and expressive idioms.
- MUNCH, A Scream Through Culture - flights, recovery and cultural diffusion.
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