Self-Portrait in the Studio

Böcklin painted this self-portrait in 1893 for the Kunstmuseum Basel, the city where he was born, and he presented himself exactly as he wanted that museum to keep him. He was 66, prosperous and in demand across Europe, and he shows himself at the easel as the assured master of his own likeness, well dressed, brush in hand. What the picture quietly leaves out is his health. The year before, in 1892, he had suffered a stroke, and none of that strain reaches the confident face he sends to his home town. He worked it in tempera, the old Italian medium he had spent years reviving, and it became the image of himself he chose to hang where he had started out.