The Megalithic Tomb

Böcklin was barely 20 when he painted this, and he was already looking backward, past the tidy Alpine views expected of a young Swiss painter, to the mood of an older German Romanticism, of Caspar David Friedrich and Carl Gustav Carus. The subject is a prehistoric stone tomb set high in the mountains, just below the snowline, with small anonymous figures gathered around it as if in the middle of some rite whose meaning we are not told. In the boggy foreground a heron-like bird steps out of the reeds. This is one of his earliest surviving pictures, made before he ever went to Italy, when the feeling he was after still came from northern weather and old stone.