The Scream’s Clouds

Welcome back. On occasion, I’ve ventured into the world of art, where I have no background (among other blog posts Authenticating Artwork Computationally and Authenticating Artwork Addendum). A study of the painting The Scream by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) has me venturing again. 

Edvard Munch’s The Scream
(1893), The National Gallery,
Oslo, Norway.

You’re probably familiar with the painting or at least the character portrayed, whether from reproductions, horror movies or Halloween costumes. But the study by researchers from the UK’s Oxford and London universities and Rutgers University focused on the sky, not the character.

Munch’s graphical depiction may be the earliest visual documentation of a type of cloud largely unknown to atmospheric science at the time.

The Scream
The dates of artwork can be important when trying to identify possible sources of inspiration. Unfortunately, Munch is known to have been indifferent about dating his work, in addition to producing many versions of the same painting.

There are four known versions of The Scream in paint and pastel. The National Gallery in Oslo, Norway, holds a painted version, dated 1893; the Munch Museum in Oslo holds a pastel version, dated 1893, as well as a painted version, undated but thought to be 1910; and a second pastel version, dated 1895, was sold for nearly $120 million in 2012. Munch also produced a lithograph version in 1895.

A glance at the painting suggests the character is screaming, yet the character was attempting to smother the sound according to Munch’s diary entry in 1892 and his later description of the image: “…the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The color shrieked…”

Possible Sources of Inspiration
Presuming that Munch’s painting captured the sky as he actually saw it, the researchers judge the event to have been either an abnormal or particularly striking sunset, a sunset affected by a volcanic eruption or some other meteorological phenomenon.

The volcanic sunsets caused by the August 1883 eruption of Krakatau in what is now Indonesia is often posited as the cause of Munch’s blood-red clouds. Munch’s whereabouts and the dates of Krakatau-affected sunsets over northern Europe narrow his possible observation to the winter months of 1883.

An alternative explanation, which the researchers favor over volcanic sunsets, was put forth in a 2017 study by a meteorological consultant from Norway and researchers from the University of Oslo and Norwegian Meteorological Institute. That study attributed Munch’s observation to nacreous clouds.

Photographs of nacreous clouds taken on 20 Jan 2008 from Leirsund, southern Norway, at times: (top left) 1508:56, (top right) 1532:47, (middle left) 1533:17, (middle right) 1534:20, (bottom left) 1546:35, and (bottom right) 1548:11 UTC. (Photos by F. Prata from journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/BAMS-D-17-0144.1)

Nacreous clouds are seldom seen, filmy sheets, unbelievably bright with vivid and slowly shifting iridescent colors, curling and uncurling in the winter polar stratosphere at altitudes of 15,000–25,000 meters (49,000–82,000 feet). They are best seen within two hours after sunset or before dawn.

In Support of Nacreous Clouds
For the study, the researchers determined from the literature that nacreous clouds are sometimes observed during cold winter months in southern Norway. The clouds produce very dramatic skies, being most noticeable when the sun sets and clouds redden to what could be described as blood red.

They also established that the direction and location of the scene depicted in The Scream are compatible with the direction and location for nacreous cloud observations.

Going further, the researchers performed detailed analyses of the colors and patterns, comparing the sky and clouds in the painting to photographs of volcanic sunsets and nacreous clouds.

Comparison of sky in (a) 1910 and (b) 1893 versions of The Scream with photographs of (c) nacreous clouds and (d) a volcanic sunset (from journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/BAMS-D-17-0144.1).

The waviness in the sky in The Scream is absent in the volcanic sunsets, while a uniform progression from red to deep blue seen in volcanic sunsets is absent from the painting. In contrast, The Scream’s alternating patterns of colors and eye-like structure are evident in the nacreous cloud photographs.

Wrap Up
Although The Scream might have been inspired by a particularly striking sunset, a volcanic sunset or simply by Munch’s mental state, the sky depicted in the painting is remarkably similar to that of nacreous clouds.

Reiterating, if Munch did observe then paint his sky with nacreous clouds, The Scream would likely be their first graphical depiction. This would be relevant to atmospheric scientists, particularly to those interested in the historical aspects of the development of cloud science. Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.
Study of the sky in The Scream in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society: journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/BAMS-D-17-0144.1
Article on the study on ScienceDaily website: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180723142808.htm
2017 study of The Scream in Royal Meteorological Society’s Weather journal: rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/wea.2786
Nacreous clouds (type II polar stratospheric clouds):
www.atoptics.co.uk/highsky/nacr1.htm
weather.com/news/news/ozone-chlorofluorocarbons-cfc-nacreous-clouds-polar-vortex-stratosphere-reaction
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_stratospheric_cloud
The Scream:
www.edvardmunch.org/link.jsp
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream
mymodernmet.com/edvard-munch-the-scream-painting/

A version of this blog post appeared earlier on www.warrensnotice.com.

Photo Interpretation Addendum

My inability to determine much by studying the photograph in last Friday’s blog post, The House in the Photograph, belies my experience at photo interpretation. One of the courses I taught for years was essentially an image analysis course focused on environmental applications. I was asked to develop the course to complement other courses in our Remote Sensing curriculum.

On the first day of class, when students were still shopping for electives, I would tell them everything about the course--how great it was, the schedule of topics, my expectations, grading etc, and I’d show at least these four 35 mm slides to give them a taste.

Although I let the direction and depth of image analysis vary each year with the students’ freewheeling identifications and interpretations, with or without voting, you might like to see how you would have fared. (Information about each photo is at the bottom.) Would you have wanted to come back for more?

Tell me everything about the scene and
 support your analysis with what you see.

You struggled with the first photo,
but this one will make you feel cuddly.
Tell me everything about the scene.

Uh-oh. This one is tough. Again, tell
me everything about the scene.

This one should be easy. Fill in all
the (who, what, where, when) blanks.

Photo 1: A bus stop, Philippines, 1971. Identifying the buses, signs, activities, dress and wet streets narrow the location. When enterprising students moved closer to the screen, they could read the orange display sign on the bus front, “Divisoria,” adding Spanish (or Tagalog) to the mix and leading to comments about image resolution.

Photo 2: A panda, Beijing Zoo, 1982. Identifying the panda and structure narrows the location to a zoo. Studying the people and dress, and knowing which zoos have pandas, might take you further.

Photo 3: A formally dressed, elderly woman, holding a basketball, Philippines, 1972. The woman’s dress appears Spanish; the banana leaf on the right suggests it’s subtropical or tropical. Having seen the bus stop photo, students usually guessed the Philippines. But the basketball didn’t fit and wasn’t readily identified. Once identified, it did lead to fun interpretations.

Photo 4: Man, woman and dog in temperate zone, winter setting, 1970. Everything in the photo was familiar to most of the students, leading to speedy answers; e.g., snow and vegetation point to temperate zone, car and fashions (woman’s bell-bottom pants) suggest approximate date. But students always guessed married couple, which wasn’t the case; they were only friends. Interpretations are indeed interpretations; identifications can take you only so far.

The House in the Photograph

Welcome back. How well do you rate as a listener? I’m terrible with directions or stories or peoples’ anything if I only hear them. I usually do better if I see it, whatever it is, but I still needed seven months to notice a photograph hanging on our bedroom wall.

Hand-colored version of our bedroom
photograph. Rovilla Griffith Botteen (left)
and Fred Botteen’s mother in front of
“Mabel’s house,” ca 1900-1910.

My wife Vicki took care of the apartment’s wall hangings before I arrived. Most are fine-art photographs taken by my daughter Rachel. The photograph in the bedroom was very old and of a house with two women in front, one blurred. When I asked Vicki who was in the photograph, she knew only that it was Mabel’s house.
 
Photo Sleuthing
 
I, of course, dove in to investigate. OK, it wasn’t much of a dive. Shortly after I asked, Vicki dug up three other old, mounted photographs of people at the house. These had names on the backs: Rovilla and Fred Botteen, Rovilla and Albert H. Griffith, and James Lewellyn’s children.

Given the names, I found ample information online, and Vicki’s father was a source of fact and rumor. Unlike my own family tree, it would probably be relatively easy to fill in every blank if I weren’t content with the highlights, which took me from our bedroom to a museum collection of Lincoln memorabilia.  

Mabel and Bill

Mabel lived and, in 1990, died in the house in the photograph, yet Vicki’s parents had purchased the 160 acre farm years earlier from Mabel and her husband William (Bill) A. Griffith, who predeceased her by over a decade. Their daughter has since passed away.

Regardless of Bill’s success as a farmer prior to the sale, Mabel brought home a paycheck. She commuted daily to town, where she was employed as a bookkeeper.

Rovilla Griffith Botteen and Fred Botteen in
front of “Mabel’s house,” ca. 1900-1910.

Bill had inherited the farm from his parents, Albert and Myrtle, who had inherited it from Albert’s parents, William and Rovilla. Fred Botteen entered the picture (literally) in 1898 by marrying Rovilla, widowed in 1897, the year of Fred’s divorce from a woman absent from the photographs.

Albert and Myrtle

Albert H. Griffith graduated Ripon College in the Class of 1898. (Nearly half of the graduates were women!) At some point after his father William died, Albert split the farm, married Myrtle and moved into a house on the 80 acres across the road from the house in the photograph, then occupied by his mother Rovilla and her new husband Fred. 

Albert became a renowned scholar of Abraham Lincoln. In 1930, he sold his Lincoln memorabilia collection, which included tons (really) of periodicals, for the new Lincoln Museum of Fort Wayne, Ind. That museum closed in 2008; its holdings were transferred to a consortium of the Indiana State Museum, Allen County Public Library in Fort Worth and Indiana Historical Society.

Albert (left) and Rovilla Griffith, standing
with children of James Lewellyn in front
of “Mabel’s house,” 1888.

I didn’t follow up on Fred, but after Rovilla died in 1928, Albert and Myrtle remained in the house across the road. When their son Bill married Mabel, Albert allowed them to share his and Myrtle’s house, but he wouldn’t let anyone occupy the house in the photograph. The house sat empty for 20 years until Myrtle then Albert died, and Bill and Mabel moved in.

Wrap Up

Vicki loved Mabel’s house, especially the setting. When Vicki took me to see and consider the house for a future home, it had been empty for several more years and was showing signs of vandalism. Since we were living far away, retirement undefined, and since the house needed untold fixes, I didn’t encourage Vicki’s dream.

Now that we’ve retired, it’s too late. The house in our bedroom photograph, the house that Albert H. Griffith, born 1871, labeled his “childhood and boyhood home” on each photograph, was destroyed by a volunteer firefighter arsonist.

Thanks for stopping by.

P.S.

Rather than cite online cemetery records and the like, I’ll focus on Albert H. Griffith and the Lincoln collection.
- Ripon College Archives Class of 1898 (may need to copy and paste URL): http://content.mpl.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/Ripon/id/328/rec/10
(Ripon, Wis., now a city of fewer than 8000 people, was the birthplace of the Republican Party in 1854.)
- Article on Griffith in Wisconsin State Journal, 1924: www.wisconsinhistory.org/wlhba/articleView.asp?pg=1&id=2378&hdl=&np=&adv=yes&ln=Griffith&fn=Albert&q=Rev.&y1=&y2=&ci=&co=&mhd=&shd=
- Paper on Lincoln read by Griffith at a 1931 conference, from Wisconsin Magazine of History: www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4630866?uid=3739256&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21102566524327
- Report of the “Eight Collections of the Lincoln Museum,” 1931: www.archive.org/stream/eightcollections01linc/eightcollections01linc_djvu.txt
- Write up on Lincoln Museum and its closing from Everything Lincoln website: www.everythinglincoln.com/acrossamerica/LincolnMuseumFtWayne.html
- Newspaper article on 2008 transfer of Lincoln Museum collection, The State Journal-Register, Springfield, Ill. www.sj-r.com/news/x1720692299/Lincoln-collection-to-remain-in-Indiana
- The Lincoln Collection in Indiana described on the Allen County Public Library website: www.acpl.lib.in.us/LincolnCollection/