Isle of the Dead  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Isle of the Dead is a well known painting by Arnold Böcklin. Böcklin produced several different versions of the painting. All versions depict an oarsman and a standing white-clad figure in a small boat crossing an expanse of dark water towards a rocky island. In the boat is an object usually taken to be a coffin. The white-clad figure is often taken to be Charon, and the water analogous to the Acheron. Böcklin himself provided neither public explanation as to the meaning of the painting nor the title, which was conferred upon it by the art dealer Fritz Gurlitt in 1883.

Adolf Hitler, in particular, was obsessed by the picture (he possessed the Berlin version). Freud, Lenin, and Clemenceau had prints in their offices.

The first version of the painting, which is currently at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, was created in 1880 on a request by Marie Berna, whose husband had recently died. Other versions are now located in collections in Basel, Berlin and Leipzig.

Complete list

1. (1880) - Oil on board, 74 x 122 cm The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Reisinger Fund, New York.
2. (1880) - Oil on canvas, 111 x 115 cm Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Kunstmuseum, Basel.
3. (1883) - Oil on board, 80 x 150 cm, Staatliche Museen, Berlin.
4. (1884) - Oil on copper, 81 x 151 cm, destroyed in Rotterdam during World War II.
5. (1886) 80 x 150 cm, Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig.

Inspirations

• A French graphic novel in five tomes, L'île des morts, was published on the Böcklin painting's theme with a strong influence of writer H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos by the editor Vents d’Ouest at Issy Les Moulineaux, in 1996.
• The Quay Brothers' 2005 film 'The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes' is said to be inspired by the painting, as well as by the book 'The Invention of Morel' by Bioy Casares. Some of the scenery in the film (shot in a studio in Leipzig) is particularly reminiscent of the Leipzig version of the painting.
• The Swiss artist H. R. Giger has also created a version of this picture, simply called "Bocklin".
• The Russian Romantic composer Sergei Rachmaninoff composed a symphonic poem, Isle of the Dead, Op. 29, inspired by this painting.
• Roger Zelazny used the picture as an inspiration for the meeting place of two mythological antagonists in his novel Isle of the Dead.
• The Italian illustrator Milo Manara also depict this painting in one of his graphic novels (Au revoir les etoiles) in which the main character revives classical paintings. [1]
• In J.G. Ballard's novel The Crystal World, Böcklin's painting (the 1880 oil on canvas version) is used to describe the gloom of the opening scene at Port Matarre.
• August Strindberg's play The Ghost Sonata ends with the image of Isle of the Dead, one of Strindberg's favorite pictures.
• There is a downloadable map for the computer game Aliens versus Predator 2 based on the Isle of the Dead.
• The painting appears as a location in the Pocket PC graphical adventure game, Fade.
• The author Bernard Cornwell, in his books The Warlord Chronicles of the 1990s, associates the Isle of Portland in Dorset with the Isle of the Dead. In the book he describes how the island was a place of internal exile and damnation. The causeway that almost links the island to the mainland was guarded to keep the "dead" - who included the criminally insane - from crossing the Fleet and escaping back into Britain. However, this is literary conjecture and not archaeological fact.