31st August: The Scream recovered

On this date in 2006 Edvard Munch's famous painting The Scream was recovered in a raid by Norwegian police, two years after it was stolen on August 22, 2004. 10 things you might not know about The Scream:

1. The original title of the painting was Der Schrei der Natur ("The Scream of Nature").
2. Munch has described how he was inspired to paint it: "One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord—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 colour shrieked."
3. He liked his idea so much that he reproduced it several times, in different media, including a lithograph stone so prints could be made of it.
4. He even wrote a poem based on the idea, and hand painted the poem onto the frame of the pastel version of the work.
5. The scene has been identified as the view from a road overlooking Oslo, the Osl Oslofjord and Hovedøya, from the hill of Ekeberg. There was a slaughterhouse and a mental hospital nearby, where Munch's sister Laura Catherine was a patient.
6. Some historians believe that the red sky in the picture was inspired by the red skies caused by the eruption of Krakatoa ten years before Munch painted The Scream.
7. The 2004 theft wasn't the first time the painting had been stolen. On 12 February 1994, the same day as the opening of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, two men broke into the National Gallery, Oslo, and stole its version of The Scream, leaving a note reading "Thanks for the poor security."
8. The 1895 pastel-on-board version of the painting, owned by Norwegian businessman Petter Olsen, sold at Sotheby's for a record US$120 million at auction on 2 May 2012.
9. Cartoonist Gary Larson included a "tribute" to The Scream (entitled The Whine) in his Wiener Dog Art painting and cartoon compilation, in which the central figure is replaced by a howling dachshund.
10. The Ghostface mask in the Scream series of horror films is based on the painting. It was created by Fun World employee, Brigitte Sleiertin, as a Halloween costume, but was discovered by Marianne Maddalena and Wes Craven who used it for the film.