Isle of the Dead

In the last week of June 1880, this panel left Böcklin's studio in Florence for a house at Büdesheim, near Frankfurt. It is smaller than the canvas it repeats, and painted on wood, and it had been ordered that April by Marie Berna, whose husband, the financier Georg von Berna, had died of diphtheria in 1865. On 29 June Böcklin wrote to tell her the picture had gone off the previous Wednesday, and that she would be able to dream her way into the world of shadows until she seemed to feel the faint, mild breath that ripples the sea. It hung in her house until her death in 1915. By then she had married Count Waldemar von Oriola, and when the count telegraphed his good wishes for the painter's 70th birthday in 1897, Böcklin wrote of the couple as the happy owners of the island of graves. Her heirs sold the panel in 1924 to a dealer in Lucerne, and two years later it was bought for New York.