Screaming clouds

Abstract

‘Mother‐of‐pearl clouds’ appear irregularly in the winter stratosphere at high latitudes, about 20–30km above the surface of the Earth. Mie scattering from cloud particles with sizes near the wavelength of visible light is responsible for their extraordinarily beautiful colours. There were no reported observations of such clouds before 1870. We argue that the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch may have been terrified after seeing a spectacular mother‐of‐pearl cloud event and that this experience prompted him to paint The Scream.

Letters

“…Fikke et al . () give examples for that year: the first observation of such clouds outside Norway was made by the astronomer C. Piazzi Smyth on 11 December 1884 and Störmer has already seen such clouds … in 1884 at the age of 10 (Störmer, ) – while we did not find such a statement in Störmer (), we found in Störmer (): mother‐of‐pearl clouds … have also been seen in Great Britain in 1884, 1885, and later … I remember when I was a boy about 10 years old I saw these phenomena in my native town of Skien, in Norway, during a strong föhn wind, in the year 1884 ; Skien is just 136km southwest of Oslo; given that Carl Störmer was born on 3 September 1874, his first observation was probably at the end of 1884, a year after the ‘volcanic winter’.…”

“…Fikke et al . () convincingly show that the clouds in the background of Edvard Munch's famous paintings Despair (1892–1894) and The Scream (1893–1910) may well be the rare ‘mother‐of‐pearl clouds’ which can appear in winter at high latitudes approximately 30–60min both before sunrise and after sunset. We would like to add here a few comments on the direction of view and the dating of the celestial observation which inspired Munch.…”

“…The composition, which depicts people on a street in the foreground with the Oslo fjord and some buildings behind them, exhibits a very similar perspective across all paintings in the so‐called Scream series, namely Despair , The Scream , and Anxiety (1892–1910). A text by Munch next to a drawing shows that the placement of the sky background above the city centre of Oslo is neither arbitrary nor fabricated: I was walking along / the road with two / friends – when the sun / went down / The Sky suddenly / turned blood‐red / I paused, leaned / against the fence tired / to death – above the / blue‐black fjord and city / blood in flaming tongues hovered … (citing the English translation by Francesca M. Nichols of Munch's hand‐written Norwegian text on MM T 2367, a drawing with literary sketch, obtained from the Munch Museum, shown in Figure ; similar translations in Olson et al ., ; Fikke et al, ); the dating of this quotation to ‘Nice, 22 January 1892’ by Heller () was doubted by Tøjner and Gundersen (); the drawing shows the above situation, like in Despair but in grey, plus red cloud layers very similar to those in Anxiety .…”

“…Fikke et al . () could not fix the year of Munch's observation: in the three winters before the Scream series, 1889/90, 1890/1891, and 1891 / 1892, Munch was in France; mother‐of‐pearl clouds were logged at Christiania observatory in several winters from February 1871 to January 1892 – Fikke et al . (): it may well be that Munch had seen such clouds at some other winter occasion before 1889 .…”

The Sky in Edvard Munch’s The Scream

“…Howard's descriptions included sketches of various cloud types, but interestingly not 49 all. Fikke et al (2017) have hypothesised that the sky in "The Scream" has a striking similarity to …”