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
The Awakening and Selected Stories
1899 · 286 pages
On a Louisiana resort island a married woman learns to swim, and the pleasure undoes everything she agreed to be. Edna Pontellier wants a life of her own, and 1899 offers none.
★ 7.1
Spirit of the Dead Watching
1892 · Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
A girl lies face down and frightened while a hooded figure sits behind her. Gauguin said his Tahitian companion was afraid of the dark.
★ 7.1
The Picture of Dorian Gray
1891 · 112 pages
Told by a charming aristocrat that beauty is everything, Dorian Gray wishes his portrait would age in his place, and it does. Wilde's epigrams carry every page, and the horror arrives beneath them.
★ 7.0
Hunger
1890 · 206 pages
Starving in Kristiania, the city that became Oslo, a young writer gives away money he lacks and refuses food when offered. Hamsun tracks a mind sliding toward derangement, and modern fiction followed.
★ 7.0
Dracula
1897 · 512 pages
An English solicitor rides into the Carpathians to close a property deal and finds his client is a corpse with plans for London. Every undead figure since works from Stoker's Count.
★ 7.0
The Turn of the Screw
1898 · 134 pages
A governess at a country house becomes certain that two dead servants are working on the children in her care. James engineered the ambiguity so precisely that critics have argued for a century.
★ 7.0
The Boulevard Montmartre at Night
1897 · National Gallery, London
Pissarro painted these boulevards from a hotel window over and over, but only once after dark, the gaslight smeared across wet pavement.
★ 6.9
Madonna
1894 · National Gallery (Oslo), Oslo
Munch gave the Madonna a red halo, closed eyes and parted lips, and made desire and death the same subject.
★ 6.8
Suicide
A Study In Sociology
1897 · 405 pages
Protestants kill themselves more often than Catholics, single people more often than married. Durkheim turned the most private act into a social fact, and every social science since counts the way he counted.
★ 6.8
The Division of Labor in Society
1893 · 362 pages
What holds a modern society together when its members no longer share a creed? Durkheim's answer is the division of labor itself: the more specialized we become, the more we need each other.
★ 6.8
The Boating Party
1894 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
A dark-suited oarsman fills the foreground with his back while the water rises behind with no horizon, a design taken from Japanese prints.
★ 6.7
The Theory of the Leisure Class
1899 · 304 pages
Veblen argued that the rich buy expensive things to prove they can afford waste, and that idleness is itself a display. He named it conspicuous consumption, and nobody has improved on the term.
★ 6.7
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
1892 · 213 pages
Twelve cases at 221B Baker Street, from the king undone by Irene Adler to the whistle in the night at Stoke Moran. No human character in fiction has been played by more actors.
★ 6.7
The Time Machine
1895 · 320 pages
Wells sent his traveler to the year 802,701, where the gentle Eloi live above ground and the Morlocks feed on them below. Every time machine since is a copy of his.
★ 6.6
Effi Briest
1895 · 255 pages
Married at seventeen to a baron of thirty-eight who once courted her mother, Effi is stranded in a bleak Baltic town. Fontane lets a code nobody believes in destroy her anyway.
★ 6.6
The War of the Worlds
1897 · 138 pages
Cylinders fall on Horsell Common outside Woking, and the Martians rise out of them with heat-rays and walking machines. Wells turned the British Empire's own conquests around and pointed them at Surrey.
★ 6.6
Jungle Book
1894 · 256 pages
Raised by wolves and schooled by a bear and a black panther, Mowgli lives hunted by the tiger Shere Khan. Kipling's Law of the Jungle went into English as a phrase everyone uses.
★ 6.4
De Profundis · 1897
Anxiety
1894 · The Munch Museum, Oslo
The same bridge and the same burning sky as the Scream, but with a whole crowd coming toward you instead of one figure.
★ 6.1
The Adventure of the Naval Treaty · 1893
Plessy v. Ferguson · 1896
Melancholy
1892 · National Gallery (Oslo), Oslo
A man broods on the shore while a couple boards a boat far off, and the curving coastline carries the whole mood by itself.
★ 5.7
The Interpretation of Dreams · 1899
Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
The Picture of Dorian Gray · 1890
Paul Verlaine
Selected Poems (Oxford World's Classics)
1896 · 368 pages
Music before everything else, Verlaine demanded, and wrote French verse so hushed composers could not leave it alone. Rain on the town becomes weeping in the heart, with no reason given.
★ 5.4
An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.
The Principles of Psychology · 1890