Le Jardin de la mort

Hugo Simberg made the first version of this in 1896, when he was in his early twenties and studying under the Finnish master Akseli Gallen-Kallela. The scene is his own invention. Three black-clad skeletons stand in a plain garden, watering pots of flowers and tending them with a strange, homely care. Simberg usually refused to explain his pictures, but this one he did. On a sketch he wrote that the garden is the place where the dead go before they reach Heaven, and the skeletons are the ones who look after them there, gentle rather than frightening. The idea stayed with him. A few years later he painted a large version of it straight onto the wall of the cathedral in Tampere, where it still watches over the congregation.