Rest on the Flight into Egypt

This is a fresco, painted straight onto wet plaster, and it was never made for a church. In 1868 Böcklin took a commission to decorate the garden room of a Basel house, and in about two months he finished three wall paintings for it. This Rest on the Flight into Egypt was one of them, alongside a King David with his harp and the walk to Emmaus. Fresco was an Italian craft he had learned in the south, and using it here, on a private room in Basel rather than an altar, was an unusual choice. The subject is the quiet halt in the Gospel story, the moment the family stops to rest on the road out of danger. The plaster was later lifted from the wall, which is how a garden-room decoration ended up in a museum.