Vita somnium breve

The Latin title means life is a short dream, and in 1888 Böcklin set out to paint exactly that. He gathered the three ages of a human life into one tall frame, from the child at the foot to old age above, arranged around a stone that reads like a memorial tablet. By this point he was in his sixties, decades past the Alpine views of his youth, and working in the symbolist manner that made his late reputation. The panel is large, oil on mahogany and nearly 180 centimetres high. Its stillness owes more to funerary sculpture than to a lively scene of people, which is close to what he wanted from it.