Art in Ads · 11

A Quiet Night From the Year of The Scream

The screaming face is everywhere. But in the same year, Munch also painted something very, very quiet.

Edvard Munch, The Girl by the Window, 1893

The Girl by the Window

Edvard Munch1893

01Where you've seen it

A figure clutching its face with its mouth wide open. Munch's The Scream gets repeated endlessly on T-shirts, inflatable dolls, ads and parodies. Munch made The Scream several times, in paint, in pastel and as a print. One pastel version sold at Sotheby's in New York in 2012 for about 120 million dollars. In 1994 and 2004, two different versions were stolen from two museums in Oslo, and both were recovered.

02The real story

In 1893, the year Munch first made The Scream, he also painted The Girl by the Window. A girl in a white nightgown stands in a dark room, holding the curtain and looking out. Blue light from the window lays a white square on the floor.

We never see her face. The painting does not tell us what she is looking at. The same painter who gave us a scream that year also gave us a night without a sound.

Tell a friend like this

The year Munch made The Scream, 1893, he also painted a quiet girl standing at a window. Same painter, same year.

One line is enough.
Next time that painting shows up, your friend will spot it first.

See this painting up close →