Viola

Böcklin painted Viola in 1866, the year Basel called him back to help decorate its new museum, where he made frescoes and modelled grotesque masks for the facade. Between those public jobs he painted this single female figure. He rarely explained his titles, and beyond the name little about her is documented. She belongs with the imagined, poetic heads he liked to paint in these years rather than with any identified sitter. It is oil on panel, made in the middle of the busiest Basel season of his working life.