Self-Portrait

Böcklin painted this self-portrait in 1862, when he was 35 and about to settle again in Rome, the city where he had spent his lean twenties. It is a small, sober oil on a mahogany panel, roughly the size of a sheet of paper, the artist looking steadily out with no props and no theatre. Ten years later he would paint himself far more famously, with a skeleton fiddler leaning in at his shoulder, and that later picture is the one most people call to mind as a Böcklin self-portrait. This earlier one shows the man before that idea arrived, still making his name, meeting his own eye in the plain daylight of the studio.