Mountain Landscape with Chamois

In 1849 Arnold Böcklin was 22 and freshly out of the Düsseldorf Academy, where he had studied landscape under Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, a painter of grand, composed scenery. This high Alpine view carries that training. The foreground lies in shadow while the far peaks catch the light, and a chamois, the nimble wild goat of the high mountains, works its way across the rock. There is no myth here and no allegory, just weather and stone seen by a young Swiss painter in the German Romantic manner he had been taught. It is a modest oil, made years before he moved south to Italy and turned to the strange, poetic subjects he became known for.