Edvuard Munch ou le cri des nauges

One of the most spectacular paintings in the history of art is "The Scream" by Edvard Munch. What could be the background for this tormented face? Munch himself describes an episode when the "sky suddently turned bloody red ... I felt as though a vast, endless scream passed through nature". He talked about this to a painter colleague who later wrote "He yearns for the impossible and has despair as his religion ... but advised him to paint it - And he painted his peculiar 'Scream'". In this article we describe an irregular, but often very spectacular cloud phenomenon, called "nacreous clouds" or "mother-of-pearls clouds", occurring after sunset in the stratosphere 18 to 30 km above the earth's surface near Polar Regions, and how this cloud have influenced the sensitive mind of a young man. We also find that an earlier hypothesis based on volcanic dust from the Krakatau eruption cannot be valid