Portrait of Alexander Michelis

This is about as early as Böcklin gets. In 1846, still in his teens, he was studying landscape painting at the Düsseldorf Academy under Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, and this small portrait on cardboard shows a fellow student from that circle, Alexander Michelis, a few years older, who would go on to his own career as a German landscape painter. The two knew each other as young men learning the same trade. It is an intimate, unfussy head, painted at a scale that fits in two hands, and it catches Böcklin before any of the myth and melancholy arrived, simply recording the face of someone he trained beside.