Most people know Edvard Munch for a single image, The Scream. This episode goes far beyond that pop-culture icon to trace the full arc of the Norwegian painter’s life: a childhood shaped by tuberculosis, poverty and a father’s fear-based religious piety, a rebellious young adulthood in the Christiania Bohème, the Berlin scandal that made him famous, and the turbulent romance that ended with a gunshot, two damaged fingers and a portrait sawed in half.

We follow Munch through the 1908 breakdown that sent him to Dr. Daniel Jacobson’s clinic in Copenhagen, the electrification treatments and enforced sobriety that stabilized him, and the bright, optimistic work that followed on his farm at Ekely. The story ends with the Nazi regime labeling him degenerate in Germany, then attempting to claim him as a Nordic hero in occupied Norway, and hijacking his funeral against his family’s wishes.

• How the deaths of his mother and sister Sophie planted a lifelong dread of consumption and insanity
• Hans Jaeger’s directive to write your life and the first soul painting critics called the work of a madman
• Paris, Gauguin and Van Gogh, and why Munch thinned his paint with turpentine and let it drip
• The blood-red sunset walk that inspired The Scream and the enormous, infinite scream of nature
• The Sun, the farm years, and the will that left over a thousand paintings to the city of Oslo