Arnold Böcklin, Mythology and Death

Arnold Böcklin, the nineteenth century Swiss symbolist, is another of my favourite painters, though he is not quite as technically proficient and awe-inspiring as Casper David Friedrich. Böcklin specialised in subjects with a mythological theme in the main. He also had an obsession with death, nowhere better expressed, perhaps, than in The Isle of the Dead, possibly his most famous painting, and his self-portrait with a skeleton in the background playing the violin.