Arnold Böcklin: Isle of the Dead, First Version (1880), Basel

In May 1880 Arnold Böcklin wrote from Florence to his patron Alexander Günther that the Isle of the Dead was at last far enough advanced to make, more or less, the impression it was meant to make, and that he had now begun work on “the small Isle of the Dead”. The canvas he was describing is the one now in Basel. It is the first of the five versions in which Böcklin varied this pictorial invention, executed in the spring of 1880 in his Florence studio for Günther. Painted in oil on canvas and measuring 111 × 155 cm, it belongs to the Kunstmuseum Basel (Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel), in the city where the painter was born in 1827, and is held there as a deposit of the Gottfried Keller Foundation, Federal Office of Culture, Bern.

Arnold Böcklin, Isle of the Dead (Die Toteninsel), first version, 1880, oil on canvas, 111 × 155 cm, Kunstmuseum Basel, deposit of the Gottfried Keller Foundation; the canvas begun in Florence for Alexander Günther, from which all later versions derive.

Known in English as Isle of the Dead or Island of the Dead, and in German as Die Toteninsel, the picture shows a rocky island of tombs and cypresses rising from a dark, motionless sea, with a rowing boat approaching it from the foreground. In the boat travel a standing figure wrapped entirely in white and a long object under a white cloth. Böcklin’s own name for the subject, written Todteninsel in the spelling of his day, already appears in that letter of May 1880.

Alexander Günther, Marie Berna and the Pictures of 1880

The work was being painted for Günther when a visitor changed the course of the project. In April 1880 Marie Berna, a young widow, came to the Florence studio and saw the canvas standing half finished on the easel. She asked for a picture of her own, which Böcklin painted on a wooden panel of smaller format, 73.7 × 121.9 cm. That second version, acquired by the Metropolitan Museum in 1926, was commissioned as a memorial to her husband, who had died some years earlier, and according to the museum’s record it was at her request that Böcklin placed in its rowing boat the draped coffin and the shrouded figure. He later assured her, in a letter, that “you will be able to dream yourself into the world of dark shadows.”

The Basel canvas carries the same boat, figure and coffin. When these elements entered its composition, whether they were intended before Berna’s visit or introduced once her commission had given the subject a funerary occasion, is not stated in these museum accounts. The Kunstmuseum Basel’s catalogue entry points to a related imbalance in the evidence: the sources concerning the “small Isle of the Dead” have survived in greater number than those on the first version. The larger and earlier picture is therefore the less documented of the two, and much of what is known about its genesis comes to us through the history of its smaller sibling.

Composing the Isle of the Dead: Rock, Cypress and Still Water

The island fills almost the entire width of the canvas, yet it touches neither edge. Open water, and a low horizon at roughly three-quarters of the picture’s height, remain visible at left and right, so that the mass reads as something isolated, set down in the sea. Two blocks of rock of unequal shape enclose it. On the left rises a tall, ragged cliff; on the right, a broader and more rounded mass; both are weathered in ochre and umber and crowned with tufts of dark vegetation. Between them the land opens into a recess, and out of the recess grows a dense stand of cypresses, black-green, vertical, tightly packed, the tallest reaching almost to the upper edge of the canvas. One slender cypress stands a little apart on the right, its silhouette sharply drawn against the sky.

Frontal and nearly symmetrical, the arrangement forms a horseshoe of stone around a vertical core. Alison Hokanson, discussing the New York version, has compared Böcklin’s construction to a stage set, and the Basel canvas invites the same reading: the cliffs function as wings, the cypresses as a dark backdrop, and the strip of water in the foreground as the space before the stage across which the boat advances. A boat, a steep rock and steps climbing its face also structure Böcklin’s Castle by the Sea, where they serve a narrative of crime. Here they carry no story beyond the arrival itself.

Tomb Façades in the Rock

Architecture is cut into both cliffs. On the left, a bright cubic block of white masonry is built against the rock, with a lower white wall stepping down towards the water; behind it, in a face of darker stone, a row of rectangular doorways opens, unlit. On the right, high in the rock, three openings framed in a warmer red-brown suggest a rock-cut façade, and a white stepped structure, strongly lit, lies beneath them against the cliff. Lower down, in the recess between the two masses, a pale structure at water level appears to serve as a landing. These are the forms that the Metropolitan Museum describes in its own version as tomb-like structures, burial chambers set in the rock. No figure appears anywhere on the island, and the route from the landing to the chambers cannot be followed with certainty.

Light under a Night Sky

The sky is a heavy slate blue, darkest towards the top and the right, laid in with dragged strokes that run horizontally and obliquely. Its darkness suggests nightfall, although the time of day remains uncertain. The cliffs, however, are warmly lit from the front, as if by a low sun or a lamp placed outside the picture, and the source is never shown. Light falls with particular force on the white architecture, on the pale ledge at the right, on the standing figure and on the cloth over the coffin, so that the eye moves back and forth between the pale accents in the boat and those on the island. The cypresses absorb light almost entirely; at their centre the canvas comes close to black.

The Boat, the Shrouded Figure and the Draped Coffin

Small in relation to the island, the boat lies low in the picture and slightly left of centre. Its hull is reddish brown, and its reflection breaks into a few bright touches on the water below. A seated oarsman, little more than a dark body and an ochre patch at the head, works two long oars that reach out on either side. Above him rises the figure in white, upright and completely covered, its head reduced to a rounded hood in which no face can be made out. At the right-hand end of the boat lies the coffin, its cloth hanging over the side in a single bright fold.

The Metropolitan Museum’s German-language text identifies the corresponding figure in the New York panel as a widow, an allusion to Berna’s own loss. In the Basel canvas, begun for a different patron, any such identification can only be inferred. The figure has no attribute and makes no gesture; its hands are not visible, and the drapery conceals any indication of sex. What it does is accompany the coffin. It stands, motionless, at the moment of approach, and the picture stops before the landing.

Brushwork, Colour and the Monogram AB

Böcklin’s handling changes from zone to zone. In the rocks the paint is worked in broken, scumbled layers of ochre, sienna and umber, with thin pale strokes dragged across the left-hand cliff to suggest weathered stone, while the vegetation along the summits is touched in loosely. The white architecture is treated quite differently, as flat, clearly bounded planes whose hard edges make them read as built, cut and placed. The cypresses are soft-edged vertical masses with almost no internal modelling. In the water, an almost uniform blue-black is broken by short horizontal touches of light beneath the boat and the landing, and by a few small vertical glints near the lower left corner. There, painted in a dark tone barely distinguishable from the sea, stands the monogram AB.

The material side of Böcklin’s work has drawn specific attention in Basel. The bibliography attached to the painting in the museum’s online collection includes a study by Paolo Cadorin on conservation problems in Böcklin’s pictures at the Kunstmuseum Basel, and the museum has announced that the artist’s choice of materials and supports will be examined more closely in preparation for its forthcoming exhibition.

The Five Versions of Die Toteninsel

Between 1883 and 1886 Böcklin painted three further versions of the subject, each slightly different. The version of 1883 belongs to the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin; another is in Leipzig; one was destroyed during the Second World War. Together with the Basel canvas and the New York panel, four versions therefore survive. The Basel picture remains the starting point of the series: the invention as it first stood in the Florence studio, on canvas and on a larger scale than the panel painted for Berna.

The four extant versions have never been seen together, not even by Böcklin himself. To mark the bicentenary of the painter’s birth, the Kunstmuseum Basel has announced a bicentenary exhibition, Böcklin: Beyond the Myth, scheduled for 4 September 2027 to 23 January 2028, at which all four are to be shown side by side. Produced in cooperation with the Alte Nationalgalerie, the project is preceded in Berlin by an exhibition of the same title from 19 March to 1 August 2027, which, according to the Berlin museum’s announcement of August 2026, will bring together all four surviving versions for the first time. Berlin’s presentation recalls the origin of the commission in a patron’s request for “a picture to dream about.”

Death, Dream and the Isle of Life

The meaning of the picture has never been fixed by an inscription or a programme. Cypresses, tombs cut into rock and a shrouded figure escorting a coffin across water point, as the Metropolitan Museum puts it, to death, mourning and the afterlife, themes that met the late nineteenth century’s fascination with spirits, séances and mortality. The landscape is invented. Böcklin drew on Italian and Mediterranean scenery but transformed what he had seen into an imaginary place, a process whose roots lie in Italian landscapes of around 1859 such as the Campagna Landscape. For the Kunstmuseum Basel, the result is one of the most famous landscape paintings in history and an icon of Symbolism.

Basel also owns the picture most often read alongside it. Because of their compositional parallels, Böcklin’s Isle of Life (Die Lebensinsel) has frequently been treated in the literature as a counterpart to the Isle of the Dead, a version of which is in the Kunstmuseum Basel under inventory number 1055. Seen together in the same collection, the two islands set the populated against the deserted, the bright against the nocturnal.

Reception soon outran the painting itself. Reproductions were said to hang in countless German middle-class homes, and Sigmund Freud is reported to have kept one in his office. Sergei Rachmaninoff’s symphonic poem Isle of the Dead (1909) took its starting point from the image, and Salvador Dalí was among the painters who returned to it. Böcklin’s bold colour and the psychological charge of his late compositions also mattered to Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico. In Germany, meanwhile, a strand of reception steeped in nationalism attached itself to his work, and with it came the charges of anti-modernity that the Basel exhibition catalogue sets out to examine, interpretations that, as the museum notes, often grew independently of what the artist himself intended.