Reference Painting: I - THE ISLE OF THE DEAD by Arnold Böcklin

THE ISLE OF THE DEAD (1880), which Böcklin himself entitled “a tranquil place”. It was clearly important to him; he made five different versions of the composition. The white-draped coffin on the boat, the funerary presence of the cypresses, and the overwhelming impression of immobility and silence suggested the new title. The white figure vividly lit by a setting sun is contrasted with the dark, vertical forms of the trees, impervious to the slanting rays of the sun. Like a dream, the painting condenses a number of contradictory sensations and emotions. Böcklin's choice of imagery is not coincidental. A young widow had asked him for an “image to dream by”, and the funereal serenity perhaps echoes something of the artist's own emotions about death. At the age of twenty-five, during one of his stays in Rome, he had married the daughter of a pontifical guard who bore him eleven children between 1855 and 1876; five of them died in infancy, and the Böcklin family was twice (in 1855 and 1873) forced to flee cholera epidemics.