Portrait of Clara Bruckmann-Böcklin

This is the painter's daughter Clara, set down in 1876 as a plain likeness rather than a figure from myth. By that year the Böcklins were living in Florence, and Clara was the child who spent the most time around his studio, sitting for him again and again over the years that followed. The married name in the title, Bruckmann-Böcklin, is the one she carried later in life. Here she is simply herself, in ordinary clothes, looked at by a father who happened to be a professional painter. Among the crowded mythological scenes he was turning out in these Florence years, a straightforward family portrait like this was the rarer thing to find on his easel.