The island that doesn’t exist: Böcklin and the vertigo of the eternal

Why has this work, among so many others, haunted the imagination for over a century? Why did Hitler keep a copy in his Alpine retreat, while Freud hung an engraving above his desk? And how did a Swiss painter, trained in Düsseldorf and settled in Florence, manage to capture the very essence of modern anxiety—that sensation that death is not an end, but a door left ajar onto the unknown?

01The painter who spoke to shadows

Arnold Böcklin was born in 1827 in Basel, into a merchant family where German was spoken with the lilting accent of the borderlands. His childhood was cradled by Alpine legends: tales of cursed hunters, bottomless lakes where sunken cities slept. At eighteen, he left for Düsseldorf, then the capital of German Romantic painting. There, under the guidance of Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, he learned to paint landscapes where nature was never innocent. Forests whispered, rocks hid faces, and clouds carried omens.

But it was in Rome, where he settled in 1850, that Böcklin found his true voice. The golden light of the Roman countryside, the ivy-covered ruins, the frescoes of the catacombs—all of it fed his imagination. He befriended the Nazarenes, those German painters who sought to revive medieval religious art, but he turned toward a very different kind of mysticism. In the Etruscan cemeteries of Tarquinia, he discovered painted tombs where the dead, smiling, feasted for eternity. “They do not mourn their fate,” he wrote to his wife. “They dance.” This macabre serenity marked him forever.

Yet Böcklin was not a joyful painter. The death of his daughter Beatrice in 1876 plunged him into a melancholy from which he never emerged. “Life is a disease for which death is the cure,” he confided to a friend. It was during this period of mourning that he began work on The Isle of the Dead. The first version, painted in 1880, was a commission from the Countess Oriola, a widow who wanted “a painting to meditate on the hereafter.” Böcklin delivered a canvas where everything was silence: a boat glided over black water, a veiled figure stood at the prow, and in the distance, a rocky island bristling with cypresses sheltered white tombs. “Is it a cemetery? A purgatory? A gateway to the unknown?” The countess, fascinated, asked for more. Böcklin would paint five versions of this island that appeared on no map.

02The palette of farewells

Look closely at the third version, the one in Berlin—the most famous, the darkest. The colours are as if smothered beneath a layer of mist. The sky’s blue, a deep lapis lazuli, fades to pearl grey near the horizon. The water, a bottle-green so dark it’s nearly black, reflects the cypresses without distorting them, as if it were too thick to be liquid. And those white tombs, perched on the rocks like decayed teeth—Böcklin painted them with a mix of lead white and green earth, a hue that evokes both the flesh of corpses and the moss on old walls.

The light, meanwhile, comes from nowhere. No visible sun, no moon—only a diffuse glow that seems to emanate from the tombs themselves. “It is the light of the soul,” Böcklin said. “The one that lingers when the body is gone.” Art historians long believed it to be moonlight, but recent analyses have revealed that the light source is, in fact, the viewer. The shadows on the boat converge toward us, as if we ourselves were the ghosts observing this scene.

And then there is that detail that chills the blood: the gilded door, slightly ajar in the cliffside. No one knows what it hides. A passage to the beyond? A burial chamber? Or simply nothingness? Böcklin refused to say. “If I had known, I would not have painted the picture,” he reportedly told an overly curious visitor.

03The boat that never returns

The veiled figure at the boat’s prow is one of the work’s great mysteries. Is it Charon, the ferryman of the Greek underworld? Is it the Countess Oriola herself, making her final journey? Or Böcklin, confronting his own mortality? X-rays have revealed that beneath the final version, the face was more defined—almost a self-portrait. Then Böcklin blurred the features, as if to erase all identity.

The boat itself is a source of fascination. Unlike the traditional skiffs in depictions of Charon, this one resembles a Venetian gondola, with its curved prow and wooden canopy. Some see a reference to the barche dei morti of Italian cemeteries, the boats that carried the dead to funerary islands. Others read it as a metaphor for life: a one-way journey where neither destination nor passengers are chosen.

And then there is the question that haunts visitors: is the boat arriving or departing? In the first version, the answer seems clear—it is heading toward the island. But in the later ones, Böcklin muddies the waters. The water is so still that no wake is visible. “Perhaps it has already arrived,” suggests a curator at the Nationalgalerie. “Perhaps we are the dead, and the island is but a dream before waking.”

04The island that haunts Europe

No sooner was The Isle of the Dead completed than it became an obsession. Engravers seized upon it, poets described it, composers drew inspiration from it. Rachmaninoff, after seeing a black-and-white reproduction, composed his symphonic poem in 1908. “I didn’t know what the painting was about,” he later admitted. “But I felt its soul.” In 1913, Max Reger wrote a piano suite titled Four Paintings after Böcklin, in which The Isle of the Dead took centre stage.

The Surrealists made it a manifesto. “Böcklin painted the unconscious before Freud,” wrote André Breton in Surrealism and Painting. Salvador Dalí, fascinated by the canvas, saw in it “the first work where death is not an end, but a passage to another dimension.” In 1934, he painted The Spectre of Sex-Appeal, in which a ghostly figure emerges from a landscape inspired by Böcklin.

Even cinema claimed the island. In Nosferatu (1922), Murnau filmed the vampire’s castle as an Expressionist version of The Isle of the Dead—white walls, black cypresses, a light that seemed to seep from the stones. “Böcklin invented the set design for horror films,” noted a film historian. Later, Tim Burton, in Corpse Bride, would pay homage to this macabre and poetic aesthetic.

Yet the work was not always celebrated. The Nazis initially deemed it “degenerate”—too melancholic, too distant from their ideal of virile strength. But Hitler, a compulsive collector, owned a copy. “He hung it in his office at the Chancellery,” recounted a historian. “As if to remind himself that death, too, had an appointment with him.”

05Arnold Böcklin’s five islands

Böcklin painted five versions of his island. Five variations on the same theme, like a musician endlessly revisiting a motif, shifting the nuances.

The first, from 1880, is the brightest. The sky is a pale, almost Mediterranean blue, and the tombs seem less menacing. “It is still a dream, not a nightmare,” notes a curator at the Kunstmuseum Basel. The Countess Oriola, who commissioned it, died shortly after receiving it. Some saw it as an ill omen.

The second version, larger, was bought by Count Schack, a Munich patron. Böcklin added details: steps carved into the rock, more cypresses, a more dramatic light. “He was beginning to understand that his island was not a place, but a state of mind,” wrote art historian Robert Rosenblum.

The third, the one in Berlin, is the most famous. Painted in 1883, it is darker, more mysterious. The sky is a deep night blue, and the light seems to come from within the tombs. “Here, Böcklin achieves perfection,” a critic remarked. “The balance between beauty and terror.”

The fourth, smaller, is almost a sketch. The outlines are less sharp, as if seen through fogged glass. “Böcklin was aging,” explained a specialist. “He knew he would not have time to paint other islands.”

The fifth, finally, is the most vertical. The cypresses are taller, narrower, like black flames. The sky is streaked with clouds, and the water seems agitated. “It looks as if the island is about to disappear,” murmured a visitor to the Hermitage. “As if it had never existed.”

06The final voyage

In 1901, Böcklin died in San Domenico, Italy. He was seventy-three, and left behind a body of work that had marked his era without ever being confined by it. “He was too modern for the academicians, too classical for the avant-garde,” summed up a biographer.

Today, his five islands are scattered across Europe. The first, in Basel, hangs in a museum where visitors sometimes come on pilgrimage. The one in Berlin, the most famous, draws silent crowds. And the last, in Saint Petersburg, watches over the halls of the Hermitage like a well-kept secret.

“Why does this work still move us?” asks an art historian. “Because it gives no answers. It only asks the question: what if death is just another shore?”

Perhaps that is why The Isle of the Dead continues to haunt our imaginations. Because it is not an allegory, nor a symbol, nor even a metaphor. It is a mirror. And in that mirror, each of us sees what we fear—or what we hope.

So the next time you come across a reproduction of this painting, pause. Look closely at the boat, the veiled figure, that door ajar in the cliffside. And ask yourself: what if it were you, at the prow, about to cross the threshold?