Isle of the Dead
1886
oil on panel
80 × 150 cm
Museum der bildenden Kunste, Leipzig, Germany
Arnold Bocklin (1827 - 1901) was a Swiss symbolist painter. He was born at Basel. His father was descended from an old family of Schaffhausen, and engaged in the silk trade.
He first won a reputation with the large mural “Pan in the Bulrushes” (c. 1857), which brought him the patronage of the king of Bavaria. From 1858 to 1861, he taught at the Weimar Art School, but his nostalgia for the Italian landscape pursued him. After an interval during which he completed his mythological frescoes for the decoration of the Public Art Collection, Basel, he settled in Italy and only occasionally returned to Germany, and then to experiment with flying machines. During his last two decades, his work became increasingly subjective, often showing fabulous creatures or being based on dark allegorical themes, as in “Island of the Dead” (1880), which provided the inspiration for the symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead by the Russian composer Sergey Rachmaninoff.
He is an original, proud, somewhat eccentric painter who, like Da Vinci, experimented in his garden with human flight. He disliked giving titles to his pictures and declared that he painted in order to make people dream. "Just as it is poetry's task to express feelings, painting must provoke them too. A picture must give the spectator as much food for thought as a poem and must make the same kind of impression as a piece of music..." (Arnold Bocklin)
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