Феликс Ауэрбах

In 1906 Munch was in Germany, in the years just before the breakdown that would put him in a Copenhagen clinic. The man who sat for him, Felix Auerbach, was a physicist and professor at the university in Jena. He and his wife had met Munch at the Nietzsche archive, where the painter was at work on a portrait of the philosopher, and they were struck enough to invite him to Jena and pay 500 marks for a likeness of Felix. Munch painted him in a single burst that February, in loose, nervous strokes, as a confident man of the world holding your gaze. Auerbach, who was Jewish, kept the portrait until 1933, when he and his wife took their own lives soon after the Nazis came to power.