Spring (sketch)

This is a sketch, not a finished picture, an idea worked out quickly in paint before the real thing. The subject is spring, a theme Böcklin would return to in more polished form over the following years. A sketch like this shows the stage before the myth and the finish arrive, the bare setting and the first idea of the composition, done for the painter's own eye rather than a buyer's. It dates to 1862, when Böcklin was in his mid-thirties and still some years from the mythological pictures that made his name. The handling is thin and fast where a finished canvas would be worked smooth. It survived because someone kept it rather than scraping it down for reuse.