The Island of Life

Böcklin painted this in 1888, the same year he finished the last of his famous dark island pictures, and he meant it as their opposite. He called it their antipode. Where the darker island stands walled in cypress and silence, this one is loud with light. A crowd in bright clothes gathers on a small green meadow, and the trees rising behind them, palms next to blossoming cherry, are species that would never share a shoreline in nature. He made only one version of it. The Basel museum, in the town where he was born, keeps it alongside one of the 1880 versions of the darker island, so a visitor can stand between the two.