Portrait of Anna Elisabeth Burckhardt-Brenner

Böcklin is remembered for sea monsters and sacred groves, which makes a sober middle-class portrait like this an odd thing to find in his work. He painted it in 1868, during the five years he spent back in his native Basel, when commissions from the city's old families were steady, paying work for him. The sitter belonged to the Burckhardts, one of Basel's leading merchant families. Her name, Burckhardt-Brenner, joins her husband's house to the family she was born into, the Brenners, as Basel custom recorded a married woman. There is no myth in the picture and nothing invented, only a careful, plain likeness of one particular woman, made to order in a year he otherwise spent painting frescoes and gods.