Ernest Thiel

In 1905 the Stockholm financier Ernest Thiel asked Munch to paint Friedrich Nietzsche, five years after the philosopher's death. Thiel had translated Nietzsche into Swedish, and Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth put the two men in touch. That commission turned a collector who owned a few Munchs into the painter's most important buyer. Munch came to Stockholm in the spring of 1907 and painted Thiel himself, standing full length. He was not satisfied with it. He had seen only the Nietzschean side of the man, he said, and never got behind the mask. The deflation crisis of the early 1920s wrecked Thiel's fortune, and in 1924 he sold the villa and the pictures in it to the Swedish state, so the portrait still hangs in the rooms he built for his collection.