Albert Kollmann

The man in this 1906 portrait is Albert Kollmann, a German collector and self-styled mystic who attached himself to Edvard Munch and worked to sell him into Germany. Kollmann believed in unseen forces and in Munch's gifts with about equal conviction, and he pushed the painter's work on to influential German patrons at a point when Munch badly needed them. Munch painted him more than once. Here he sets the older man against a dark ground, the face lit and watchful. Two years after this, Munch's nerves gave way and he checked into a clinic in Copenhagen. Kollmann had been one of the steadier figures in the years before that.