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How to Read Arnold Böcklin’s Most Famous Mystical Painting
Entering the isle of the dead
Christopher P Jones is the author of What Great Artworks Say, an examination of some of art’s most enthralling images.
This painting shows a moonlit island across an expanse of inky dark water.
Arriving at its shore is a boat: an oarsman rows whilst another figure stands ahead, shrouded from head to toe in white and brilliantly illuminated. At the prow of the boat is a rectangular object covered in a light-coloured sheet, undoubtedly a coffin, ready to be interred on the island — the Isle of the Dead.
The island itself is a dense grove of tall, dark cypress trees. Any moonlight that reaches the isolated rock seems to be consumed by the trees as if light cannot permeate their black solemnity.
Around the trees, the island forms a rough horseshoe shape, providing a sort of natural harbour for arrivals to enter. A number of crypts are carved into the rock, either empty or else taken by previous incomers.
Death Emerged
When the artist Arnold Böcklin first made the work, he painted it without the coffin or the figure dressed in white. Nor did he give the painting a name. For Böcklin, it was simply a “painting for dreaming over”.
It was only when a patron, Marie Berna, visited him at his studio in Florence and expressed that the half-finished painting reminded her of her husband’s death several years earlier, that the other details arrived. Böcklin began a second version for Berna, which in a letter he referred to as “die Gräberinsel” [“Island of the Graves”]. The boat with the coffin and figure in white were added to both versions following Berna’s commission. Finally, it was Böcklin’s art dealer Fritz Gurlitt who settled on the title Isle of the Dead.
The symbol of a rowing boat added deeper resonance to the painting, having a long history in myth: in Greek mythology, the souls of the dead were carried across the River Styx to the gates of Hades by the oarsman Charon.
