Idyll (Fragment of a Screen)

This panel was never meant to be a painting. It was cut from a folding screen, a piece of painted furniture that once stood in a room to partition it, and only later was this stretch framed and hung as a picture on its own. What survives is a pastoral idyll, the warm, southern kind of scene Böcklin carried north from his years in Italy. In 1872 he was living in Munich, supplying mythological landscapes to a growing German market, and decorative work like this was one way those inventions reached ordinary interiors rather than gallery walls. This fragment is simply the part that was kept when the screen was taken apart.