Isle of the Dead

This is the first of the five islands Böcklin painted. He finished it in Florence in the spring of 1880 for a collector named Alexander Günther, then found he liked it too much to give up and kept it for himself. That April a young widow, Marie Berna, had come to the studio and seen it half-painted on the easel. She asked for a version of her own, and into hers Böcklin worked a white-shrouded figure standing in the boat and a coffin laid before it. Only afterward did he add those same two elements to this earlier canvas, which had begun without them. The title everyone uses was not his idea either. Böcklin called it a Gräberinsel, an island of graves. It was his Berlin dealer, Fritz Gurlitt, who in 1883 sent the prints out under the name Isle of the Dead.