In 2005, 'Einstein & The Jealous Monk' was purchased from IAP Fine Art by the Huddersfield Art Gallery, where it hangs in its permanent collection alongside works by Francis Bacon, Henry Moore and Sir Jacob Epstein. It is perhaps the first painting partially inspired by a Bob Dylan lyric to be acquired by a museum collection.

The lyrics are from Bob Dylan's great 1964 ballad 'Desolation Row':
“Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood with his memories in a trunk
Passed this way an hour ago with his friend, a jealous monk
[…]
You would not think to look at him, but he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin on Desolation Row…..”

"...Bob Dylan fans will recognise a quote from Desolation Row, used by Gollon as a random imaginative trigger in the same way as actors use free-association in improvisation. The parallel is a fitting one because, like acting, Gollon’s art is to do with storytelling. Song lyrics, news photos, events in his own life and, increasingly, since a commission for a series of Fourteen Stations of the Cross*. for St John on Bethnal Green - the classic stories of Christian iconography - all provide starting points for Gollon’s new pictures. His influences are as eclectic as his sources. Stylistic references to El Greco, Ribera, Goya and Beckmann mix on equal terms with a range of pictorial devices from early Renaissance gold grounds to contemporary speech bubbles or animation backdrops: the distant mountain ranges linking his new pictures owe more to Looney Tunes than Mantegna. As a narrative painter he wants his work to be readable, and as a voracious consumer of visual ideas he has acquired the vocabulary to make it. Since establishing himself as a painter of the absurd, Gollon has shifted into tragicomic territory […] he is guided less by artistic precedent than gut instinct, which explains how, in an age of post-modern painterly angst, he can go on producing such gutsy paintings. “All art is theft”, said Picasso. Gollon is a pro who steals to order, and resets his gems in an idiom that is completely contemporary, and completely his own."
Laura Gascoigne, art critic, extract from an article on Chris Gollon in Galleries magazine, September 2004

*Chris Gollon’s Fourteen Stations of the Cross (a critically-acclaimed site-specific series of large paintings) were blessed by Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, and permanently installed in 2009, in the Grade I-listed Church of St John on Bethnal Green, next to the Young V&A, London.

This painting is featured in the documentary 'CHRIS GOLLON: Life in Paint' (85 mins) - world premier at the Barbican, London in 2024.