Edvard Munch created four copies of "The Scream" - updated with info about the sky

You learn something every day.  I knew about "The Scream" and even how the red sky may have been the result of a volcanic eruption, but until reading about a sale of one version of "The Scream" in the Wall Street Journal this morning, I didn't know there were so many varieties:

One of four versions of "The Scream" that Munch created, this is the only one not in an Oslo museum and the first to ever come up at auction...

Top clients have visited the picture privately at Sotheby's in New York, sitting in high-backed chairs set a short distance from the work inside a locked room. "One of the world's great collectors said, 'I could sell all my pictures, put this on my wall, put my chair here with a cup of coffee and stare at it for the rest of my life and be happy,'" says Mr. Shaw...

The version of the "The Scream" up for sale at Sotheby's is a bright mix of 12 different colors, with the skeletal character in the foreground sporting one blue nostril and one brown one. The third in a series created between 1893 and 1910, the work was created with pastel on rough board. Some art dealers view the pastel as a mark against the work, though others say the lines and colors are more electric than even those found in the painted versions. The picture offers another standout feature: its frame, inscribed with the original 1892 poem Munch wrote that is said to have inspired the work. In it, he describes walking along that fiord, "trembling with anxiety" and sensing "an infinite scream passing through nature."

No way I could "stare at it for the rest of my life and be happy," but it's still interesting.  More at the link, and note BTW that the scream is not coming from the man in the painting.

Addendum:  Mental Floss offers a fresh perspective on this classic painting.  They begin by citing an entry in Munch's diary -

“I was walking along the road with two friends

—the sun was setting

—I felt a wave of sadness—

—the Sky suddenly turned blood-red... [continued at the link]

- then address the question of why the sky would turn blood-red.  Normal sunsets are of course red-shifted, and previous explanations have suggested that he was remembering sunsets accentuated by atmospheric volcanic ash as a result of the Krakatoa eruption some years earlier.

But another possibility was raised in 2017 when three Norwegian researchers postulated that the sunset Munch saw that day included nacreous clouds such as these:

Nacreous clouds (Google gallery of images), offer the advantage of being instrinsically "wavy" in appearance, in contrast to the standard uniform red sky produced by volcanic ash.  There's a good discussion of the matter at the Mental Floss link, via Neatorama.