Arnold Bocklin
Born – Basel, Switzerland 1827
Died – San Domenico, Ital 1901
Bocklin was a leading Swiss painter during the nineteenth century. He trained extensively in Paris, Germany and Flanders, spending periods in Rome between 1850 and 1857. Bocklin’s emphatic idealism heightened with romantic and symbolic overtones was to prove influential to a number of artists, including Max Klinger and Franz Von Stuck. Stylistically the Modernist camp opposed the near naturalistic interpretation of landscape, nymphs and satyrs. Bocklin’s treatment of his subject matter was critically received by the German Impressionists. Bocklin made several versions of Island of the Dead. It has a monumentality and grandeur reminiscent of German painter Casper David Friedrich’s sublime landscape. The enigmatic, morbid theatricality of the scene and the mysterious shrouded figure that, by implication, could represent the viewer’s future, would have appealed to the European fin-de-siecle decadents.
Masterpieces:
- Pan in the Reeds
- Triton and Nereid
text: The A-Z of Art, Nicola Hodge and Libby Anson.