The beginning of Brides head Revisited came instantly to mind: " `I have been here before', I said, `I had been there before!' " But in my case, unlike Charles Ryder, I knew that I had not.
It was Tuesday on a wooded hillside overlooking Oslo, and as I stepped from the car to go into a hill-top restaurant, I trawled the deepest recesses of my mind for the fons et origo of my vivid deja vu. And then it came to me: it was The Scream!
Edvard Munch's famous lithograph, completed in 1893, shows a quivering, almost ghost-like figure running across a bridge in terror. Its features are distorted to the point of being grotesque, and convey the torment of a deeply disturbed, psychotic inner world. The landscape in the background is rendered in a deep and bloody red, and has a fluid, macabre quality which threatens to overwhelm the screamer in some kind of private Armageddon.
The painting is set on a hill overlooking Oslo, and shows the port of that city and the fjord. The distant hills to the north and west are portrayed, and flaming "mountain wave" lenticular clouds can be seen to stand out against a lurid sunset.
Munch himself described how it came about: "I was walking in the hills outside Oslo, and as the sun set, I felt a tinge of melancholy - and then, suddenly, the sky became a bloody red.
"I stopped and leaned against the railing and looked at the flaming cloud, shaped like a sword, that hung over the blueblack fjord like blood.
"I stood there trembling with terror, and I felt a loud unending scream piercing my inner nature; it seemed to me that I could see the scream, and I painted this picture - painted the clouds as real blood."
There were no lurid, red, lenticular clouds over Oslo Fjord on Tuesday last. The scene was bright and peaceful, although slightly misty, and spectacularly beautiful, but I had little doubt that I was looking at the landscape portrayed so vividly by Munch so long ago.
"Was it from this spot," I asked my Norwegian colleague, "that Munch portrayed Oslo in The Scream?".
And he asked "The what?", and then, "Ah, yes, you mean The Shriek, for thus, it seems, is the lithograph described in Norway.
"I do not know," he said, "but it may well have been, because until his death in 1944, Munch lived just a little down the hill from here, just over there," and he pointed at the red-tiled roofs of houses peeping through the trees.