According to The National Museum of Norway, a Danish art critic first noticed the inscription during an exhibition in Copenhagen in 1904 — thinking that a member of the public had written it as an act of vandalism. .

"The writing is without a doubt Munch's own," said Mai Britt Guleng, curator at the National Museum.

"The handwriting itself, as well as events that happened in 1895, when Munch showed the painting in Norway for the first time, all point in the same direction.".

The museum confirmed the inscription's origins while the painting is undergoing extensive conservation in preparation for its installation in Oslo, Munch's home city, next year.

Henrik Grosch, then director of the Norwegian Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, wrote that Munch's paintings showed that one can no longer "consider Munch a serious man with a normal brain."

"The theory is that Munch wrote this after hearing Scharffenberg's judgment on his mental health, sometime in or after 1895," said Guleng of the inscription

In his diary, Munch wrote that the painting was inspired by "a gust of melancholy."