The Scream
1893 · National Gallery (Oslo), Oslo
Munch said an infinite scream was passing through nature, and put two figures on the bridge behind who walk on without noticing.
★ 9.2
Browse by time · decade
1890s
1890 – 1899
Showing 307 works across all media from the 1890s
The Card Players
1895 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Cézanne used local farmhands as models and painted several versions, stripping the old tavern subject down until only two men and a bottle remain.
★ 8.7
Heart of Darkness
1899 · 110 pages
Marlow steams up the Congo to retrieve an ivory agent gone strange upriver. Conrad found empire hollow, and the novelist Achebe's charge of racism has kept the book under argument ever since.
★ 8.6
The Sleeping Gypsy
1897 · Private collection
A lion sniffs at a sleeper in the desert without waking her. Rousseau was a customs officer who never took a lesson.
★ 8.5
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
1891 · 342 pages
Zarathustra comes down from his mountain to announce that God is dead and man is something to be overcome. Nietzsche wrote it as scripture rather than argument, and readers take it personally.
★ 8.5
Where Do We Come From What Are We Where Are We Going
1898 · Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Boston
Gauguin thought he was dying and meant this to be his last work, reading right to left from a sleeping infant to an old woman.
★ 8.5
Mont Sainte-Victoire
1895 · The Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), Philadelphia
Cézanne painted his local mountain over and over, less to record it than to rebuild it out of flat patches of green, ochre and blue.
★ 8.2
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
1891 · 492 pages
Tess, a poor farm girl, is sent to claim kinship with rich relatives, and what happens there decides the rest of her life. Hardy called her a pure woman and Victorian England erupted.
★ 8.1
The Importance of Being Earnest
1895 · 431 pages
Wilde gives two idle men imaginary people, a wicked brother and an invalid friend, to escape their obligations, then sets them courting women who will marry no one but a man named Ernest.
★ 8.0
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897
Wheatfield with Crows
1890 · Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Three paths run into the wheat and none of them go anywhere. Painted at Auvers in his last weeks, and read too neatly ever since.
★ 7.7
Portrait of Dr. Gachet
1890 · Private collection
The doctor who was caring for him leans his head on one hand, a sprig of foxglove on the table, the background rippling blue.
★ 7.5
Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies
1899 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Monet dug the pond himself at Giverny, built the Japanese bridge over it, and then painted the place for the rest of his life.
★ 7.4
The Interpretation of Dreams
1899 · 512 pages
Every dream is a disguised wish, Freud claims, and the mind disguises it by condensation and displacement. Psychoanalysis rests on this book, and the dreams it dissects are mostly Freud's own.
★ 7.3
Wheatstacks (End of Summer)
1891 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Monet painted the same stacks near his house at every hour and season, so that what changes from canvas to canvas is only the light.
★ 7.3
The Child's Bath
1893 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
A woman washes a child's feet in a basin, seen from above, the wallpaper and rug pushing everything flat as a Japanese print.
★ 7.2
Almond Blossoms
1890 · Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
He painted it for his brother's newborn son, named Vincent after him, and cropped the boughs against the sky like a Japanese print.
★ 7.2