Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche had been dead six years when Munch painted this in 1906, so the philosopher never sat for it. The Swedish banker Ernest Thiel, a devoted reader of Nietzsche, commissioned the portrait, and the arrangement was brokered by the philosopher's sister Elisabeth in Weimar. Munch worked from photographs, but he did more than copy a likeness. He posed Nietzsche leaning on a diagonal railing above a landscape, the sky behind striped in hot bands of orange and yellow, the same churning setup Munch had used years earlier in The Scream. The thinker stands lost in himself, staring off past the edge of the view. Thiel hung it in the private gallery he built in Stockholm, which is still where it lives today.