The story
The Swedish banker Ernest Thiel built this villa on a green island in Stockholm in 1907, designed by Ferdinand Boberg specifically to hang the art he was buying. Thiel was drawn to the newest Nordic painting and to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose work he helped translate into Swedish.
Those two passions meet in the house. Thiel was an early champion of Edvard Munch and bought a dozen of his paintings, and he commissioned from Munch a large posthumous portrait of Nietzsche, imagining the philosopher on a mountain path. In the tower room at the heart of the gallery hang Munch prints, and Nietzsche's death mask is kept there too.
Around them is a collection of turn-of-the-century Scandinavian art, Carl Larsson, Anders Zorn, the wildlife painter Bruno Liljefors. Thiel lost his fortune after the First World War and had to give up the villa and everything in it. The Swedish state bought the lot in 1924, and it opened to the public still arranged as his home.
