Who is the strange looking person in Edvard Munch's "The Scream" most likely modeled after?

Creedy

In his own words: “ I was walking along a path with two friends—the sun was setting—suddenly the sky turned blood red—I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence—there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city—my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety—and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. ” So, the picture is his interpretation of his feelings of anxiety, rather than any actual person. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edvard_Munch [Link added -- Zb] Sep 17 09, 6:56 PM

star_gazer

Not necessarily: In 1978, the Munch scholar Robert Rosenblum suggested that the strange, sexless creature in the foreground of the painting was probably inspired by a Peruvian mummy, which Munch could have seen at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris. This mummy, which was crouching in a fetal position with its hands alongside its face, also struck the imagination of Munch's friend Paul Gauguin: it stood model for the central figure in his painting Human misery (Grape harvest at Arles) and for the old woman at the left in his painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?. More recently, an Italian anthropologist speculated that Munch might have seen a mummy in Florence's Museum of Natural History which bears an even more striking resemblance to the painting. And: At the time of painting the work, Munch's manic depressive sister Laura Catherine was interned in the mental hospital at the foot of Ekeberg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream Sep 17 09, 7:26 PM