Portrait of Louisa Schmid

This is one of the earliest faces Böcklin painted, made in 1849 when he was 22 and years away from the islands and sea-creatures his name would later carry. The young woman is Louisa Schmid, the fiancée he expected to marry. It is a careful, straightforward likeness, the work of a painter still learning his craft. Soon after, Böcklin left his native Basel for Rome. Louisa died around 1850, about a year later, and the news reached him in Italy. He would marry there in 1853, an Italian woman named Angela Pascucci, and raise a large family. This small portrait, under 50 centimetres, stayed behind in Basel, painted before any of that, when he was a young man recording the woman he thought he would grow old beside.