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# Edvard Munch’s Ten Most Famous Paintings
- URL: https://blog.fineartamerica.com/edvard-munch-ten-most-famous-paintings/
- Published: 2026-08-10T12:21:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-24T20:52:49.000Z
- Description: The Scream, Madonna, The Sick Child and more: the ten works that made Munch the painter of modern anxiety and desire.
- Author: Fine Art America
- Tags: Famous Paintings, Art History

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) grew up in a Norwegian household shadowed by illness. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was five, his adored older sister Sophie died of the same disease when he was fourteen, and his father — a doctor of severe religious temperament — mourned them both in ways the boy found frightening. Munch later wrote that sickness, insanity and death were the angels that stood over his cradle. Rather than escape them, he made them the subject of his life’s work.

From the early 1890s he gathered his pictures into a loose cycle he called the Frieze of Life, a sequence about love, jealousy, fear and mortality that he kept expanding and repainting for decades. He simplified figures into flowing outlines, pushed color far past anything he saw in front of him, and treated the same motifs again and again in oil, lithograph and woodcut. The results shocked Berlin in 1892 and helped set German Expressionism in motion. Here are ten of his most famous works.

## [The Scream](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-scream-edvard-munch.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![The Scream by Edvard Munch](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/the-scream-edvard-munch-2.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-scream-edvard-munch.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

A hairless figure clamps its hands to its head and opens its mouth on a bridge above a fjord, while the sky above burns orange and red and two indifferent strangers walk away in the distance. Munch made the first version in 1893, and he described the moment that prompted it in his diary: walking at sunset with two friends, he stopped as the clouds turned blood red and felt an immense scream passing through nature. The figure is not screaming, in other words — it is hearing. Munch returned to the image in paint, pastel and print, and it has become the most reproduced picture of anxiety ever made.

## [Madonna](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/19-madonna-edvard-munch.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Madonna by Edvard Munch](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/19-madonna-edvard-munch-2.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/19-madonna-edvard-munch.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Munch worked out his Madonna in the mid-1890s: a bare-shouldered woman with her eyes closed and her head tipped back, one arm curved behind her, her dark hair streaming into the darkness around her. It is a devotional title fixed to an unmistakably sexual image, and the collision is the point — for Munch, conception, ecstasy and death all belonged to a single moment. The version here is his lithograph, which frames the figure in a wavering red border of swimming sperm and sets a shriveled fetus in the bottom corner, staring straight out. Few pictures of the 1890s caused more outrage; few have been absorbed into the canon more completely.

## [The Sick Child](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/8-the-sick-child-edvard-munch.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![The Sick Child by Edvard Munch](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/8-the-sick-child-edvard-munch-2.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/8-the-sick-child-edvard-munch.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

No subject held Munch longer than this one. It began in 1885–86 as a large canvas of his sister Sophie, dying of tuberculosis at fifteen, propped against a white pillow with a grieving woman bowed at the bedside. Critics dismissed the painting as an unfinished smear; Munch called it his breakthrough and returned to it for forty years across six canvases and dozens of prints. The lithograph shown here, made about a decade later, strips the scene to the girl alone — the long hair, the profile, the exhausted eyes — drawn in a dense mesh of crayon strokes that seem to be eating the room away around her.

## [The Kiss](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/8-the-kiss-edvard-munch.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![The Kiss by Edvard Munch](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/8-the-kiss-edvard-munch-2.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/8-the-kiss-edvard-munch.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Two lovers stand embracing beside a curtained window in a shuttered blue room, and their faces have fused into a single featureless mass where they meet. Munch made several versions of the subject in the 1890s, in oil and in woodcut. What unsettles people is the merging: the kiss dissolves both individuals rather than joining them, and the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, seeing an early version, described the pair as fish-like and joined at the mouth. Outside the window the ordinary world goes on, which only sharpens the strangeness of what is happening inside.

## [Summer Night. The Voice](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/2-summer-night-the-voice-edvard-munch.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Summer Night. The Voice by Edvard Munch](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/2-summer-night-the-voice-edvard-munch.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/2-summer-night-the-voice-edvard-munch.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

The Voice belongs to the Frieze of Life, Munch’s great cycle on love, anxiety and death, and it is set on the shore at Åsgårdstrand where he spent his summers. A young woman stands among the vertical trunks of a pine wood, hands clasped behind her back, chin slightly raised, looking directly out at the viewer; behind her the column of the moon’s reflection lies flat on the water. Nothing is happening, and that is the point — the picture is about the charged, sleepless stillness of a Nordic midsummer night. Munch reworked the composition for years in paint and print, and the version here is one of his stark black-and-white intaglios, where the trunks fall like bars across the image.

## [Anxiety](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-anxiety-edvard-munch.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Anxiety by Edvard Munch](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/3-anxiety-edvard-munch-2.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-anxiety-edvard-munch.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Anxiety (1894) reuses the setting of The Scream — the same bridge, the same fjord, the same wavering red and yellow sky — but replaces the single howling figure with a crowd. Men in top hats and a woman in a bonnet press forward toward the viewer, their faces white, frontal and mask-like, their eyes fixed on nothing. They look less like a group of people than like a single dread wearing several bodies. Munch was drawing here on his fascination with the anonymous urban crowd, and the picture has been read ever since as a portrait of a society sleepwalking.

## [Melancholy](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/9-melancholy-edvard-munch.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Melancholy by Edvard Munch](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/9-melancholy-edvard-munch-2.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/9-melancholy-edvard-munch.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

A man sits at the bottom right of the picture with his chin in his hand, brooding, while behind him a long curving shoreline runs away to a jetty where two tiny figures stand beside a boat. Munch developed the composition in the early 1890s from the unhappy love affair of his friend, the critic Jappe Nilssen. Almost nothing happens, and that is the achievement: the great sweeping curve of the beach, the heavy stones and the flattened bands of color carry the mood entirely. Painted at Åsgårdstrand on the Oslofjord, where Munch spent his summers, it is one of the first pictures in which he let landscape do the emotional work.

## [Death in the Sickroom](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/14-death-in-the-sickroom-edvard-munch.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Death in the Sickroom by Edvard Munch](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/14-death-in-the-sickroom-edvard-munch-2.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/14-death-in-the-sickroom-edvard-munch.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Painted around 1893, this is Munch’s second great picture of Sophie’s death, and it is arranged like a stage. The dying girl is barely visible in a high-backed wicker chair turned away from us; the family fills the green room around her, each one isolated, none of them touching, one sister staring out of the canvas with her hands hanging. Munch painted his siblings as the adults they had become rather than the children they were at the time, so the scene reads as a memory being relived. The floor tilts up, the perspective refuses to settle, and the room feels airless.

## [Self-Portrait with Cigarette](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/2-self-portrait-with-cigarette-edvard-munch.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Self-Portrait with Cigarette by Edvard Munch](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/2-self-portrait-with-cigarette-edvard-munch-2.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/2-self-portrait-with-cigarette-edvard-munch.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

Munch painted himself in 1895 at thirty-one, standing in a dark blue haze in evening dress, lit sharply from below like an actor at the footlights. His right hand holds a cigarette whose smoke drifts across his chest; his left arm has all but dissolved into the murk. It is a portrait of the artist as a figure of the bohemian avant-garde, and also — given his years of heavy drinking and the breakdown that would send him into a Copenhagen clinic in 1908 — a portrait of a man not entirely solid. The floating hands and glowing face have made it one of the most memorable self-portraits of the century.

## [Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/two-human-beings-the-lonely-ones-edvard-munch.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

[![Two Human Beings by Edvard Munch](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/two-human-beings-the-lonely-ones-edvard-munch-2.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/two-human-beings-the-lonely-ones-edvard-munch.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com)

A woman in a pale dress and a man in dark clothes stand on a shore with their backs to us, close together and entirely separate, facing an empty expanse of water. Munch worked the motif for years in paint and print; the version here is one of his woodcuts, and it shows his most inventive technique. He sawed the woodblock apart with a fretsaw, inked the pieces in different colors, then fitted them back together to print — so the very grain of the wood divides the two figures. Few images say so much about loneliness with so little incident.

More than a century on, Munch’s work has lost none of its charge. He gave visual form to feelings most people never try to draw — dread, longing, grief, the strangeness of being conscious — and did it with color so bold and lines so simple that the pictures read instantly from across a room. Hung at home, his landscapes and shoreline scenes bring a brooding northern beauty, while the great motifs make a room feel serious in the best way.

[Shop Edvard Munch prints here](https://fineartamerica.com/art/edvard+munch?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com), and explore the rest of our famous paintings collection for more of the world’s most beloved masterpieces.