Edvard Munch paintings, including "The Scream", have universal appeal in addition to their highly personal meaning. Munch's works are now represented in numerous major museums and galleries in Norway and abroad. His cabin, "the Happy House", was given to the municipality of Åsgårdstrand in 1944; it serves as a small Munch Museum. The inventory has been maintained exactly as he left it. One version of "The Scream" was stolen from the National Gallery in 1994. In 2004, another version of "The Scream", along with one of "Madonna", was stolen from the Munch Museum in a daring daylight robbery. All were eventually recovered,
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