A widow named Marie Berna visited Arnold Böcklin's studio in 1880 and asked him for a picture to dream by. She had seen a version he had just finished and wanted her own. The second version, the one in the Metropolitan Museum, is the result. Böcklin eventually painted five of them between 1880 and 1886.
The scene is simple and strange. A small boat glides toward a rock island, rowed by a figure in front of a white-shrouded passenger standing beside a coffin. Dark cypress trees rise in the center and tombs are cut into the cliffs. There is no horizon, no wind, and no way off.
Böcklin never named it that. The title Die Toteninsel came from an art dealer, and the name stuck so firmly that the painting is now hard to see any other way. Böcklin himself had no program. He talked about a place, not a story, though people have tied the mood to the English cemetery in Florence, where he buried a daughter who died as an infant, and to islands off the Italian coast. That tie rests on tradition rather than the artist's own word.
The painting became a fashion. Prints hung in thousands of European parlors. Sigmund Freud reportedly kept one, and Adolf Hitler bought the third version in 1933. Sergei Rachmaninoff saw only a black-and-white reproduction before writing his 1909 tone poem The Isle of the Dead, and he later said that if he had seen the original first he might not have written it. The color, he thought, would have put him off.
The fourth version was destroyed in the Second World War. The remaining four survive in Basel, New York, Berlin, and Leipzig.
Böcklin's Island of the Dead appears on our: