Castle by the Sea (Murder in the Castle Garden): Arnold Böcklin

Two men wait beside a red boat at the edge of the surf, while a cloaked figure, bending forward, appears to carry another figure across the wet sand towards them. Higher up, on the steps that climb the rock face, a body lies where it fell. This is the crime behind the second title of Arnold Böcklin's Castle by the Sea (Murder in the Castle Garden), and it takes up a surprisingly small part of the canvas. Painted in 1859 in oil on canvas, 112 × 177.3 cm, the work is now held by the Museum Folkwang in Essen. The museum's collection record gives its German title as Schloss am Meer (Mord im Schloss). Böcklin, who was born in Basel in 1827 and died at Fiesole in 1901, was in his early thirties when the picture was dated.

Arnold Böcklin, Castle by the Sea (Murder in the Castle Garden), 1859, oil on canvas, 112 × 177.3 cm. Museum Folkwang, Essen, permanent loan of the Federal Republic of Germany since 1966. An early forerunner of the painter's Villa by the Sea compositions.

Most of the surface belongs to other things: the wooded headland, a white loggia half-buried in foliage, a pair of cypresses, and a long blue wave breaking across the right half of the picture. Böcklin's Castle by the Sea is therefore a landscape in which a violent act happens to take place. The Folkwang counts it among the first of the so-called Villa pictures, a theme that occupied the painter for more than thirty years.

A Pirate Raid at First Light

Heinrich Alfred Schmid, the Basel art historian who knew Böcklin and published a monograph on him, described the subject plainly. In his account, pirates fall upon a splendid estate by the sea at the first red of dawn. The sky bears this out. Pale and cool, it is crossed by thin bands of cloud tinged with pink and violet, and only the upper crowns of the trees have caught the warm, low light coming in from the sea.

The left side of the composition is closed and shadowed. A stone stairway rises steeply along the cliff towards a dark opening in the vegetation near the upper edge. On one of its lower landings the dead man lies stretched across the steps, a dark shape barely separated from the shadowed stone. Böcklin has not lit him, framed him or placed him on any axis that would draw the eye. He is found, more or less, by accident.

Beside the stairs, a small arched niche contains something reddish, apparently a painted image, with a white plastered surface beneath it. It seems to be a wayside shrine of the kind that marks paths and landing places along Italian coasts. The reading is hard to confirm at this scale, but the pale patch is one of the few points of light on the shaded side of the picture.

The figures between rock and surf

The centre of the beach is given to the cloaked figure. Wrapped in dark brown, it bends forward at the water's edge, its head still above its shoulders and the cloak trailing behind towards the left. The movement runs to the right, towards the water and the boat. The figure apparently being carried is not clearly legible in the paint, and the uncertainty may well be intended. Read together with Schmid's account of a raid, the image implies a captive being carried off.

The two men by the boat are more sharply described. The nearer one, wearing a blue cap, stands in the shallows and leans on the gunwale of the red-hulled craft. His companion, a little behind him, wears a pale head-cloth and holds a long oar or pole extending towards the right above the boat. Between them and the cloaked figure, a wave rises in deep, saturated blue, its crest broken into white, and spreads in a thin glassy sheet over the sand.

Far out on the horizon, under a low bank of light cloud, a sailing ship stands against the sea. Its relationship to the raiders remains uncertain.

Light, Colour and Space in Böcklin's Castle by the Sea

Almost everything visually distinctive about the canvas comes from its distribution of masses. The left two-thirds are filled from edge to edge with rock and foliage, built up in olive, umber and dull green and warmed in places with russet and orange where the light touches the leaves. The right third opens almost completely onto air and water. Along the shore, the eye moves from the shadowed stairs, past the figures and the boat, and out towards the distant ship.

Schmid noticed this movement in the later Villa paintings. In those pictures, he wrote, the gaze is led from the left past the evidence of fading splendour towards the sea horizon on the right. The scheme is already in place here, in what he regarded as the first step towards those works.

Above the treeline, the white loggia is the principal architectural feature. Its balustrade and round arch belong to a classical, Renaissance-derived vocabulary, and a small statue appears to crown one corner. It is cut off by foliage on both sides, so that the “castle” of the title is never shown in full. Only one ornamental fragment emerges from the garden that surrounds it. To its right, two tall cypresses rise in rust-brown flame shapes above the rounded mass of the other trees. Their colour reflects the dawn light more than the dark green normally associated with the tree.

Böcklin's interest in light was well developed by this date. According to Schmid, the painter's Roman years had taught him to watch cloud shadows moving across a landscape and the flicker of sunlight in groves, and much later he still praised to his pupil Rudolf Schick the many blue shadow tones of the Roman countryside. Here the blues are concentrated in the sea, from the violet distance to the near-black hollow of the breaking wave. The pinks are kept to the sky; the warm oranges, to the foliage that the light can reach. The beach in the foreground, wet and reflective, takes something from each.

The figures are small within all this. Schmid observed that until around 1860 the human figure had played only a subordinate part in Böcklin's paintings, and the Murder in the Castle Garden fits his description. The narrative depends on its figures, yet in the pictorial structure they are staffage: a dark accent on the stairs, a brown shape on the sand, two coloured head coverings by a red hull.

From the Hannover Murals to the Villa by the Sea

The painting belongs to a crowded and difficult stretch of the artist's life. After spending seven years in Rome, Böcklin returned north in the summer of 1857. In 1858 he painted the dining room of Consul Wedekind in Hannover with landscapes of the Genoese coast and the Sabine hills. These were his first murals, and among their subjects, Schmid records, was a castle plundered by pirates. In the autumn he moved to Munich, where he and two of his children fell ill with typhus. His fortunes changed in March 1859, when his Pan in the Reeds was shown at the Munich Kunstverein and bought for the Pinakothek within the month. Castle by the Sea carries the date of that same year.

Schmid's 1922 monograph calls the Murder in the Castle Garden a preliminary stage of the Villas. The term matters, because the later pictures keep the setting and change almost everything else. In the darker Villa by the Sea of 1864, painted for the Schack Gallery in Munich, the mood has become elegiac. Böcklin, according to Schmid, imagined the last descendant of a noble family, lost in distant lands and awaited in vain by the woman who loves him. A lighter version followed in 1865, under grey daylight.

The difference in hour is telling. The 1859 canvas is set at dawn, during an act of violence. The Schack Villa places its palace under the gold of the evening sun, which Schmid read as a last light of hope and memory. Between the two, the murder, the boat and the raiders disappear.

They did not disappear from Böcklin's work. Tracing the Hannover pirate scene forward to the Attack by Pirates of 1872, Schmid showed how the raid became a subject in its own right. The villa motif went on changing too. In Florence, Böcklin returned to it in new versions now in Stuttgart, dated 1877, and Zurich, and in another of 1878–80 in Darmstadt. He then turned the villa into a ruin, and from 1880 painted ruined castles by the sea. Schmid saw the ruins by the sea and the Isles of the Dead as the successors of the Villas, with resignation replacing longing.

Seen from that distance, the Folkwang painting is the point where the motif begins. In it, the coastal house still needs an event to explain its atmosphere.

The Ligurian Coast and the Memory of Corsairs

Where did the image come from? Schmid gives an answer that is partly biographical. The villas and castles on the headlands of the rocky Ligurian coast, set right against the surf, rich in southern vegetation and once constantly exposed to raiders from North Africa, were in his view among the strongest impressions the young painter received when he first came south. This impression, Schmid suggests, may have been the strongest of his life. Böcklin returned to it, he wrote, in ever new variations.

Read against this, the head-cloth of the second boatman and the low, open boat suggest the corsair raids that coastal communities on that shore had long feared. The painting does not identify the attackers, however, and it would be going too far to name them.

Schmid adds a later episode that shows how long the theme stayed with him. In the 1870s and 1880s, at San Terenzo on the Gulf of La Spezia, Böcklin found a boatman who claimed to have been a pirate in his youth. The man rowed him around the castles of the gulf, in which Schmid recognised the models for the painter's raided castles and ruins by the sea.

The pictorial language of Castle by the Sea also has roots in landscape painting of the preceding generations. Within the heroic landscape tradition cultivated in Germany since Asmus Carstens and Joseph Anton Koch, Schmid placed Böcklin firmly. He also noted that some of the early Roman canvases look as though Gaspard Dughet and Poussin, alongside Titian, had been his real teachers. The arrangement here is consistent with that ancestry: a dense, dark mass on one side, an open view to a luminous distance on the other, and architecture and trees used as large silhouettes against the sky. What is new is the violence placed inside it, and the way the light of an ordinary sunrise is allowed to sit, untroubled, above a killing.

Titles, Ownership and Provenance

The painting's names vary from source to source, and the variation reflects how it has been understood. Schmid catalogued it simply as Der Mord im Schloßgarten (“The Murder in the Castle Garden”), naming it after its event. The Museum Folkwang uses Schloss am Meer (Mord im Schloss), which it translates as Castle at the Seaside (Murder in the Castle). Other lists combine the two as Schloss am Meer (Mord im Schlossgarten). In English, Castle by the Sea (Murder in the Castle Garden) is a commonly used form. The parenthetical subtitle keeps the narrative in view. The main title follows the later reception of the work as the first of the coastal villa pictures.

The museum's record also sets out what is known of its ownership. It was in the possession of Grand Duke Nikolaus of Oldenburg until 1942. In that year it passed through the Galerie Karl Haberstock and became what the record calls Reich property. Since 1966 it has been on permanent loan from the Federal Republic of Germany to the Museum Folkwang, under inventory number L 66/8681. The museum states that its provenance is still being clarified.

In 2024 the canvas appeared on the loan list of an exhibition at the Lentos Kunstmuseum in Linz, among the works lent by the Federal Republic. For provenance research on these loans, the list refers readers to the federal art administration. lentos.at

Sources

• Schmid, Heinrich Alfred. Arnold Böcklin. 2nd edition. Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1922. gutenberg.org
• Museum Folkwang, Essen. Collection Online: Arnold Böcklin, Schloss am Meer (Mord im Schloss), 1859, inv. L 66/8681.
• Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz. Werkliste und Leihgeberinnen* (exhibition loan list).