Arnold Bocklin Biography | Oil Painting Reproductions

Arnold Böcklin studied at the Düsseldorf Academy under Schirmer and befriended Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach. Schirmer, who perceived in him an understudy of remarkable promise, he sent him to Antwerp and Brussels, where he duplicated the works of Flemish and Dutch old masters. Arnold Böcklin then went to Paris, worked at the Louvre, and painted a few landscapes scenes.

In the wake of serving his time in the armed force, Böcklin set out for Rome in March 1850. The many sights of Rome were a jolt to his mind and imagination. These new influences brought allegorical and mythological figures into his compositions and there gave his fancy and his taste for violent color free play. His Portrait of Myself, with Death Playing a Violin, was painted after his arrival again to Munich, where he displayed Battle of the Centaurs. From 1876 to 1885 Böcklin was working in Florence and painted Prometheus.

Bocklin The Isle of the Dead.

From 1886 to 1892 he settled in Zürich. After 1892 Böcklin lived near Florence. Working in Italy and drawing on his experience in the humanities, Bocklin painted imaginary spots with exactness, coordinating symbolic components into realistic landscapes. Arnold Böcklin is best known for his five versions painted between 1880-1886 of Isle of the Dead, which somewhat evokes the English Cemetery in Florence, near his studio and where his infant little girl Maria had been buried. The Swiss artist Arnold Bocklin painted numerous forms of the voyage of the spirit, wrapped in a white shroud, traveling into the next world. A little watercraft gradually skims on the quiet, unfathomable ocean peacefully, as it approaches a secretive island with high, rough precipices. The tall, dark cypress trees suggest a graveyard and the architecture is reminiscent of funerary monuments.

Affected by Romanticism his oil painting is Symbolist with mythological subjects regularly overlapping with the Pre-Raphaelites. Arnold Böcklin had an impact on Giorgio de Chirico, and on Surrealist painters like Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí. Otto Weisert designed an Art Nouveau typeface in 1904 and named it "Arnold Böcklin" in his honor. Adolf Hitler was enamored with Böcklin's work, at one time owning eleven of his paintings.

Art Movement History: Symbolism.
Artists Influencing Arnold Bocklin: Johann Wilhelm Schirmer.
He Traveled To Italy, Germany, Belgium, France.
Painters Arnold Bocklin Influenced: Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp.
Artist's Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.