Mountain Landscape with Waterfall

As a teenager Böcklin spent two years at the Düsseldorf Academy under Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, a painter who taught landscape as high drama, with grand mountains and light arranged almost like a stage set. That training shows here. The rocks in front sit in shadow while the far peaks catch the sun, the waterfall drops through the centre, and a small wild animal is half hidden beside it. He painted this around 1849, still in his early twenties. It is a built and composed nature rather than a corner of a real valley, and that theatrical handling of light is what he carried south to Italy a year later.