Stop and Look – The Isle of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin (1880)

We seem to be living through apocalyptic times, and the art of the Symbolists such as Arnold Böcklin, fraught with anxiety and foreboding, offers congenial, if not always agreeable, subjects for contemplation at the moment.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, when Britain was reaching the height of her Imperial power and Germany was building up its rival industrial and military strength, Europe was becoming more and more aware of the complexities of human life and the human mind. Sigmund Freud began to publish his hugely influential theories, and poets and artists became increasingly preoccupied with the world of dreams, and the interrelationship of life and death.

Böcklin, a Swiss who spent much of his career in Germany and Italy, was well placed to catch and reflect on this cultural turmoil. He inherited something of the Germans’ poetic awareness of spirituality in nature, as found in the poignant landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, for instance. He was a contemporary of Richard Wagner, and his very manner of painting is often imbued with a Wagnerian weight and grandeur.

These qualities are nowhere better shown than in his most famous work, The Isle of the Dead (Die Insel der Toten), which might indeed be an operatic stage-set. The looming cypresses are a traditional feature of graveyards, as Feste’s song in Twelfth Night reminds us:

         “Come away, come away, death, and in sad cypress let me be laid…” 

Their presence on this strange islet, its rocks pierced by ancient tombs, makes for a particularly brooding atmosphere. At the same time, the gleaming stone of much more recent tombs indicates that this is no lost or abandoned graveyard: it is an active repository of the recently deceased, as we are forcibly reminded by the brilliantly lit figure, a new conscript to the world of the dead, unflinchingly upright against the dark trees as it approaches in the tiny boat that is being rowed silently into the quiet harbour.

The connotations of death are unmistakable and important here. Böcklin seems to have assembled a complete glossary of images signifying our annihilation: the night sky, the shadowy trees, the black water cutting off this cemetery from anything associated with ordinary life. But perhaps it’s wrong to give them too much emphasis. Another version of the subject, in Berlin, has the scene in cloudy daylight.

Our picture, in Basle, was painted a year or two earlier in response to a commission from a young woman who had recently lost her husband and asked Böcklin for “an image to dream by”. This is not necessarily a negative or fateful conception of Death: despite the predominant black, it’s almost a Keatsian “bower quiet for us, and a sleep/ Full of sweet dreams…”

This ambiguity of intention reflects the ambiguous interaction of life and death and is entirely true to the spirit of Symbolism, which often explored the idea of a porous boundary between the living and the dead, depicting the very moment at which life departs from the body.

Keats was an early forerunner of Symbolist thought, but the contrast between his lyrical melancholy and Böcklin’s more muscular, darkling resignation to the idea of annihilation is perhaps the difference between the English and the German death-wish. It was in Germany that the great nihilistic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche encompassed both positive and negative aspects of the subject.

While propounding the notion of an “übermensch” or superman, capable of rising above the commonplace and death-defined, he simultaneously pronounced the death of God, and deplored the over-confidence of the rationalist scientist who “instinctively regards the religious man as an inferior individual”. Whatever one’s views on the existence of God, there must be room, if only in poetry, for the contemplation of an afterlife of the soul.

This is perhaps what Böcklin’s haunting picture is about: a shred of consolation in the nightmare of contemporary events.   

Andrew Wilton was the first Curator of the Clore Gallery for the Turner Collection at Tate Britain and is the author of many works on the artist.