Nymph with Horn of Plenty

Böcklin painted this in 1866, the year he moved his family from Rome back to his native Basel. It is a thoroughly Italian daydream, the kind of sunlit classical scene he had absorbed over years in the south, now set down in a sober Protestant city on the Rhine. The figure is a spring nymph, a Quellnymphe, and she carries the horn of plenty that in older art spills out flowers and fruit. The nymph, the welling spring water, and the overflowing horn all turn on one idea, abundance rising straight out of the ground. Some readings give her another name as well, Flora, the Roman goddess of blossom.