Selbstbildnis mit fiedelndem Tod

Böcklin painted this in 1872, not long after settling in Munich. He shows himself at the easel, brush up, turning his head as a skeleton leans in close behind his shoulder and scrapes a single string on a small fiddle. The idea was not invented from nothing. In Munich Böcklin could see the old danse macabre tradition, skeletons who play music to lead the living away, including a portrait then hanging in the city that was taken for a Holbein and showed just such a figure. Böcklin had also grown up in Basel, where a famous dance of death was painted on a cemetery wall. So the painter listens to the one tune Death can play and keeps working. The fiddle has lost all its strings but one, which is the note he appears to be painting to.