Isle of the Dead

Böcklin painted the same island five times between 1880 and 1886. This is the third, made in 1883 on a wooden panel eighty centimetres high and a metre and a half wide, and it was ordered by his Berlin dealer, Fritz Gurlitt, who had watched the earlier ones find buyers.

Gurlitt also gave it the name. Böcklin never titled the picture; he spoke of a quiet place and left it at that, and it was the dealer who put the words Isle of the Dead on it in 1883. The title stuck so hard that the painting is now unimaginable without it.

Starting with this version, Böcklin signed the island itself. High on the pale rock face to the right, above one of the doorways cut into the stone, he painted his initials, A and B, as though the burial chambers were his property. Gurlitt then had the printmaker Max Klinger etch the composition, and the image began its long career on the walls of German households.