Arnold Böcklin

Arnold Böcklin lost eight of his fourteen children before adulthood, and in 1880 he painted a small canvas of a rowboat approaching a cliff-walled island of dark cypress trees, commissioned by a young widow, Marie Berna, who asked him for a picture to dream by. He called it simply A Still Place at first. The name Isle of the Dead was added later by his art dealer.

Böcklin painted five versions over the following six years. The first three were made in Florence, near the English Cemetery where his infant daughter Maria was buried, and the island's cliffs echo that cemetery's walls. He never explained the picture in public beyond saying it should produce, in his own words, a stillness that would make anyone start at a knock on the door.

Reproductions of Isle of the Dead became so common across German-speaking Europe by 1900 that Sigmund Freud kept a print in his consulting room. Adolf Hitler bought an original version in 1933 and hung it first at his Obersalzberg retreat, later in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Böcklin himself, trained in Düsseldorf and long settled in Switzerland and Italy, died in 1901 near Fiesole, outside Florence.