The Impressionists, Monet, Cezanne and Degas and their sort, purveyed a somewhat namby-pamby view of life. Their summer skies were mostly clear and blue, dotted with pretty powder-puffs of cumulus; even their most sombre winter scenes were merely a dull and misty grey, with little wisps of stratus drifting by. For human passions, violent storms and other evidence of any Sturm und Drang, we have to look to other artists of the time - such as Edvard Munch.
Edvard was not at all a happy man. He was born in Norway in 1863 into a family that would nowadays be called dysfunctional, and the experience had left its mark: "My life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm, jumping from stone to stone. Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path and join the whirling stream of ordinary life, but I am drawn again inexorably towards the edge, and there I shall walk until I finally fall into the abyss."
Munch's lonely desperation is epitomised in his painting called The Scream. Completed in 1893, it shows a quivering, ghost-like figure that runs across a bridge in terror. The grotesque, distorted features convey the torment of a deeply disturbed, psychotic inner world. The landscape in the background is rendered in a deep and bloody red, and has a fluid, macabre quality which threatens to overwhelm the screamer in some private Hell. Only the bridge, a product of technology, is stark, unbent and undistorted.
For meteorologists, an interesting aspect of The Scream is that it records a detailed weather observation. The painting is set on a hill overlooking Oslo from the south-east, and also shows the port of that city and the fjord. The distant hills to the north and west are portrayed in the painting, and flaming "mountain wave" lenticular clouds can be seen to stand out against the lurid sunset.
In his diary for November 1893, Munch described the moment of his inspiration: "I was walking in the hills outside Oslo, and as the sun set, I felt a tinge of melancholy - and then, suddenly, the sky became a bloody red. I stopped and leaned against the railing, and looked at the flaming cloud, shaped like a sword, that hung over the blue-black fjord like blood. I stood there trembling with terror, and I felt a loud unending scream piercing my inner nature; it seemed to me that I could see the scream, and I painted this picture - painted the clouds as real blood."
Despite his chronic desperation, Munch still had many decades to endure. He died 55 years ago today, on January 23rd, 1944, aged 81.