The Danish portraitist Herman Vedel was interested in older paintings, especially Dutch art of the 17th century, as is clear in his portrait of Hjalmar Söderberg. From 1906 the writer lived in Copenhagen, initially for shorter periods and later permanently. In this painting, Vedel has captured the fin-de-siècle mood of Söderberg’s literature. It portrays him as a man about town, a representative of “the incurable loneliness of the soul” (the motto of his drama Gertrud, 1906).