Madonna (Munch painting) a private home in Drammen, Norway. The fourth had been located the previous day in a private home in nearby Sande. During the court trials, Ole Christian Bach was suspected of having organized both the theft and the handling. In September 1992, Bach was sentenced to prison for seven months for handling stolen goods. On Sunday, 22 August 2004, the Munch Museum's versions of "Madonna" and "The Scream" were stolen by masked men wielding firearms. The thieves forced the museum guards to lie down on the floor while they snapped the cable securing the paintings to the wall and escaped
Edvard Munch led to a two-year state scholarship to study in Paris under French painter Léon Bonnat. Munch seems to have been an early critic of photography as an art form, and remarked that it "will never compete with the brush and the palette, until such time as photographs can be taken in Heaven or Hell!" Munch's younger sister Laura was the subject of his 1899 interior "Melancholy: Laura". Amanda O'Neill says of the work, "In this heated claustrophobic scene Munch not only portrays Laura's tragedy, but his own dread of the madness he might have inherited." Munch arrived in Paris during