Melancholy

Böcklin painted this in 1871, the year he left Basel for Munich after several settled years back in the city where he was born. He called it Melancholy, and instead of telling a story he hands the feeling a single human figure, a woman who stands in for the mood itself. Turning an emotion into a person you could imagine meeting is something he came back to across his career. The canvas is not large, a little under 75 centimetres tall. It stayed in Basel, and this quiet allegory now hangs a few rooms from the sea-gods and islands that made his name.