Thiel Gallery

The collection's real strength is Edvard Munch: twelve oil paintings and ninety-nine prints, the largest holding of his work outside Norway, built through Ernest Thiel's personal patronage and friendship with the artist and organised around the 1906 Nietzsche commission. Around that sits the Nordic circle Thiel actually knew socially: Liljefors, Zorn, Jansson, Larsson and Josephson. A small foreign wing, a single Gauguin watercolour and a single Toulouse-Lautrec, marks the edge of Thiel's ambitions beyond Scandinavia. It is a collector's cabinet rather than a survey museum, and its authority rests on the fact that Thiel bought most of it directly from artists who were his contemporaries and, in several cases, his friends.

Ernest Jacques Thiel was born in Norrkoping in 1859, the son of a Belgian Catholic engineer and a mother of German-Jewish heritage. Educated in Stockholm and trained as a merchant in Hamburg, he joined Stockholms Enskilda Bank in 1877, ran the Stockholm office of Hernosands Enskilda Bank by 1884, and in 1891 founded his own institution, Stockholms Kredit- och Diskontoforening, later Aktiebolaget Stockholms Diskontobank, which he directed until 1901. He was, in other words, a banker rather than an inherited fortune, and the collection that now fills the Thiel Gallery was built on money he made himself.

His first major purchase came in 1896: Bruno Liljefors's 'Morgonstamning vid havet' (Morning Mood by the Sea), bought for 2,000 kronor. It was the seed of everything that followed. As the collection grew, his apartment on Strandvagen became too small to hold it, and Thiel commissioned the architect Ferdinand Boberg to build him a house on Djurgarden that could. Construction ran 1904 to 1907 on Blockhusudden's highest point, a spot known as Eolskulle, in a style that mixes Italian Renaissance proportion with the geometric restraint of the Viennese Art Nouveau school: plain white facades, uncluttered surfaces, sparse decoration. The initial 1905 phase of the building was already too small for what Thiel kept buying, and Boberg added an eastern extension, the Munch room, to take the expanding collection of a single artist Thiel had come to prize above all others.

Thiel was a devoted reader of Friedrich Nietzsche and translated his work into Swedish himself. He came to regard Edvard Munch as the foremost artistic interpreter of Nietzsche's spirit and ideas, and in 1905, five years after the philosopher's death, commissioned Munch to paint his portrait. Munch had never met Nietzsche and worked from photographs, delivering in 1906 a monumental posthumous portrait, 201 by 160 centimetres, that the gallery still holds under its own accession number, TG 292.

Thiel became Munch's foremost collector and patron, assembling what the museum itself describes as the largest and most distinguished collection of Munch's work outside Norway: twelve oil paintings and ninety-nine prints. Among them are 'Despair' (1892), which the museum's own account calls the first version of the composition Munch developed into 'The Scream'; 'On the Bridge' (1903); and 'The Sick Child' (1907), one of several treatments Munch made of his sister's death from tuberculosis. A small turret room at the top of the villa carries the connection further: it holds Nietzsche's own death mask, kept alongside further Munch prints, so that the philosopher's death mask and the painter's images of him share the same small space, exactly as the banker who translated one and commissioned the other arranged it.

The deflation crisis of 1920 to 1922 destroyed much of Thiel's wealth: his equity portfolio collapsed in value and he could no longer service his debts. In 1923, ninety-three works from the collection were shown at the Gothenburg Exhibition and seen by 50,000 visitors, a public airing of Thiel's situation as he tried and failed to find a private buyer for the whole collection. He turned to the Swedish state, and on 19 December 1924 the government approved the purchase of the villa, the collection and its fixtures for 1.5 million kronor, roughly 40 million kronor in 2016 terms, financed through a special lottery rather than out of tax revenue.

The Foundation Thielska Galleriet was set up the same year to hold the collection and the building, governed by a board the state appoints; the painter Prince Eugen served as its first chairman, with the writer Tor Hedberg as vice-chairman. The gallery opened to the public on 7 January 1925, initially on Wednesdays and Sundays only, closed again for rehanging, and reopened on 26 January 1926. Admission was free at first; a 25-ore entrance fee was introduced in autumn 1926. The building has been protected as a Swedish historic monument, a byggnadsminne, since 1958.

The house Thiel built still organises the collection room by room rather than by chronology or school. Two large upper-storey galleries, lit from glass roofs exactly as Thiel specified to Boberg, carry the core hang of the Nordic painters he collected in life: Liljefors, Zorn, Josephson and Jansson. A room named for Carl Larsson, one of the three Swedish painters with whom Thiel kept a close personal friendship alongside Liljefors and Jansson, holds Larsson's work specifically. The grand entrance hall and staircase were designed as a single sequence, down to the lighting and the choice of colours, and the turret rooms at the top of the building hold the Nietzsche material described above.

The house has changed since 1907. In 1932 the old kitchens and staff quarters were converted into curator's quarters, later becoming the museum's cafe, and former bedrooms became temporary exhibition space. A 1999 restoration aimed to recover the building's original appearance after decades of institutional use, and a further interior modernisation followed in 2004 and 2005. Outdoors, the grounds on Blockhusudden hold sculpture by Auguste Rodin and Gustav Vigeland, set among the trees and water views that made the site Thiel's choice in the first place.

Swedish television's own retrospective on the country's dramatic art robberies records that in 2000, six paintings were stolen from the Thiel Gallery at night: four by Anders Zorn, one by Bruno Liljefors and one by Olof Sager-Nelson, with a combined value later estimated at 25 to 30 million kronor. The thieves escaped by car, reportedly with a boat waiting, and got away before police reached the building. None of the six works has been recovered, and the same SVT retrospective, published years afterward, still lists the case among those that were never solved. The museum's own website does not mention the theft; a visitor relying on it alone would not know six of the works once shown there are still missing.

The state owned Villa Eolskulle outright from 1982. On 1 November 2021, the Foundation Thielska Galleriet reacquired ownership of the building itself through a private donation; the underlying land remains state property, managed by the Royal Djurgarden Administration and leased to the Foundation. A support organisation, the Friends of the Thiel Gallery, was founded in 1978 and remains active, with its members among those who receive free admission. The gallery's director since 2020 has been Asa Cavalli-Bjorkman.

The Thiel Gallery is a single collector's former home, run by its own foundation, on the eastern tip of Djurgarden. It is a separate institution from Stockholm's larger state galleries that visitors sometimes mention in the same breath: not the Nationalmuseum on Sodra Blasieholmshamnen, and not the Moderna Museet on the neighbouring island of Skeppsholmen. What it offers instead is what a state survey museum cannot: a house one man built to hold pictures he had a personal relationship with, largely bought directly from artists he knew while they were both alive.

Visitors consistently describe the Thiel Gallery as a hidden gem: a substantial collection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Nordic and international art shown inside Ernest Thiel's own turn-of-the-century villa, on a quiet headland of Djurgarden with its own waterside grounds and a cafe, and without the crowds of Stockholm's larger state museums.