André Oscar Wallenberg was a naval officer who became a banker. In 1856 he founded Sweden’s first commercial bank, Stockholms Enskilda Bank, which would be of great significance for the Swedish banking system and the industrialisation of the country. Wallenberg’s business idea was that savers’ deposits formed the capital of the bank and were tied up for longer in exchange for higher interest. Troili’s painting is typical of the realistic portraits of this period, which tended to be based on photographs.