Forest Landscape with Reclining Pan

By the mid-1850s Böcklin was living in Rome, and the countryside around him started to fill with the old gods. In this forest scene, painted around 1855, Pan, the goat-legged god of woods and wild places, lies stretched out among the trees as though he had always belonged there. It marks the point where Böcklin stopped painting landscape and figures as separate things and began letting mythical beings inhabit the woods directly. That idea of a real-looking wood quietly occupied by a creature out of Greek myth is the one he kept returning to for the next 40 years, through the fauns, nymphs and centaurs of his later work.