Rodin's "Le Penseur" in Dr. Linde's Garden

In 1906 one of the first large bronze casts of Rodin's Thinker was set up not in a public square but in a private garden in Lubeck, belonging to Max Linde, an eye doctor who was one of the sharpest art collectors in Germany. Linde also backed Edvard Munch, buying his work and commissioning a whole frieze for his children's rooms. In 1907 Munch stood in that garden and painted the sculpture where it sat, among the trees and flowerbeds, in his own loose, nervy strokes. So the canvas holds two artists at once, Rodin's brooding bronze figure and Munch's restless hand. It now belongs, fittingly, to the Rodin museum in Paris.