Portrait of Jakob Mähly

Böcklin painted this small head in 1848 for a friend of his own age, Jakob Mähly, a student in Basel who had asked him for a portrait. The two had grown up together in the city. What Mähly got was a plain, unadorned likeness, close and direct, made before Böcklin had painted a single one of the myths his name now carries. Mähly's own life took a very different shape from the painter's. He studied classical languages in Basel and Göttingen and became a professor of philology at the University of Basel, teaching there for decades. The canvas is barely 30 centimetres tall, the kind of thing made between two young men who knew each other well. It never left the city, and now sits in the Basel museum that holds more of Böcklin's work than any other.