Works by Arnold Böcklin

Arnold Böcklin, a Swiss Symbolist, put figures from myth and thoughts of death into many of his pictures, and between 1880 and 1886 painted the Isle of the Dead in five versions.

Böcklin trained at the Düsseldorf academy under Schirmer, who sent him to copy Flemish and Dutch masters in Antwerp and Brussels. Mythological figures entered his pictures in Rome, where he arrived in 1850. In In the Sea, from 1883, a bearded triton plays a harp with mermaids clinging to his body, and three heads with large ears rise out of the water on the right. He painted himself with Death in Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle of 1872, after going back to Munich: a skeleton bows a violin at his shoulder while he holds brush and palette.

The 1883 Isle of the Dead shows a boat rowed towards a rock island with doorways cut into its cliffs and tall cypresses massed at the centre, a figure in white standing in the boat. The island partly recalls the English Cemetery in Florence, close to his studio, where his baby daughter Maria lay buried.

From 1886 to 1892 he lived in Zürich, then at San Domenico near Florence, and he died at Fiesole in 1901. The Plague, painted in tempera in 1898, sends a grey-faced rider in black down a town street on a bat-winged beast, over bodies lying on the paving. Every work below is a painting: religious and mythological subjects come first, then landscapes and portraits, with several self-portraits among them.

Sources: Wikipedia, Kunstmuseum Basel, Alte Nationalgalerie, Art Institute of Chicago.