In June 1880 a young widow named Marie Berna was sent a painting from Florence. It showed a small rocky island at night, walled in by cliffs, with a dark stand of cypress trees in the middle and a rowing boat sliding toward it over water flat enough to hold the reflection of the rock. In the boat a figure wrapped in white stands facing the island, beside a coffin draped in white. Six days after it left his studio, Arnold Böcklin wrote to her: “You will be able to dream yourself into the world of dark shadows, until you think you can feel the soft, warm breath that ripples the sea, until you are shy of breaking the solemn stillness with a loud word.”
That’s the painting people now call the Isle of the Dead, and he painted it five times. It is easy to read it as death, Charon rowing a soul across the Styx, but the haunting comes from the quiet Böcklin promised in that letter. There’s nothing in it that should scare anyone. It’s a beautiful place, calm water and dark trees, and it still feels like somewhere you shouldn’t be looking, because nothing in it moves.
What is the Isle of the Dead painting?
Isle of the Dead, Die Toteninsel in German, is a painting by the Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin, who painted it five times between 1880 and 1886. The first two were made in his studio in Florence in the spring of 1880. He was painting the first for his patron Alexander Günther when, in April, Marie Berna came to see him. She had been widowed young, and she asked him for “a picture to dream over”.
He made her a second, smaller one, on wood. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns it now, says she commissioned it as a memorial to her late husband, and that at her request he added the draped coffin and the shrouded figure to the boat. The two whitest things in the picture are there because she asked for them.
Run the palette on Berna’s version and four fifths of it is one swatch, a blue so dark it reads as black. Nearly all the rest is the rust of the rock. The white of the figure and the coffin is too small to get a swatch of its own. It’s a few strokes in the middle of the water, and it’s still where your eye goes first.
The five versions of Isle of the Dead
Böcklin kept going back to the island. He painted a third version in 1883 for his dealer in Berlin, Fritz Gurlitt, a fourth in 1884, and a fifth in 1886 for the Museum der bildenden Künste in Leipzig, where it still hangs. Four survive. The fourth was lost in the Second World War, and all that’s left of it is a black and white photograph.
Flip through them and the first thing to go is the night. The two from 1880 are lit from nowhere, the rock glowing against a dark blue sky. From 1883 it’s day under storm cloud. The rock changes too. In the early two it’s low and rounded and the cypresses rise way above it, and in the later three it grows into sheer walls the trees barely clear, so the island closes in around its grove. By Leipzig the posts at the landing have grown into a gate, two tall stones rising out of the water, and the boat is almost through it.
Then press All five. Six years, five paintings, and the island sits in the same place on the water, while the boat drifts and the sky goes from night to storm. It comes back the way a place comes back in a dream you keep having, a little different every time and always the same place.
Where is the Isle of the Dead?
It isn’t a place you can visit. Böcklin spent the autumn of 1879 on Ischia, in the Bay of Naples, where the Castello Aragonese stands on its own small island off the coast. Angelika Wesenberg, writing for the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, suggests that fortress came back to him when Berna asked for her picture, joined in memory with other islands of the dead, San Michele, the cemetery island of Venice, and the Etruscan tombs cut into cliffs. People have pinned it on other islands since, Pontikonisi off Corfu most of all.
It is closer to a stage. The Met’s curator Alison Hokanson says Böcklin composed it “like a stage set, so we’re able to project ourselves into the scene.” Wesenberg points to the strict symmetry, the calm verticals and horizontals, the round island walled in by rock and its magical light, and says that together they make a feeling of stillness and of being carried away from the world. The steps lead your eye up into the grove, and your eye still can’t get into the dark inside.
Who named it Isle of the Dead?
Böcklin used the name himself in a letter to Günther in May 1880: “Endlich ist die Todteninsel so weit fertig”, finally the Isle of the Dead is far enough along. The one he sent Berna he called Die Gräberinsel, the Isle of Graves. The title that stuck came from Fritz Gurlitt, who commissioned the third version in 1883. Gurlitt also had the printmaker Max Klinger make an etching after it, and the etching helped carry the island everywhere.
The Berlin museum says it was this third version, spread through countless prints and photographs, that made the painting famous. Sigmund Freud kept a reproduction in his office. Lenin hung one above his bed. A picture made for one widow’s grief ended up on ordinary living room walls, most of them in black and white. Goya’s Black Paintings had the opposite life: made for the walls of his own house and no audience, they stayed on those walls for fifty years after he left.
Hitler and the Isle of the Dead
The third version has the strangest life of the five. Gurlitt sold it in 1884 to a collector in Worms, and for fifty years it passed through Swiss and German hands. The Nationalgalerie’s provenance record has it passing in 1936 through two Munich dealers, Fritz Nathan’s Ludwigsgalerie and Maria Almas, to the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. It was one of Hitler’s favorite paintings, and it stayed with the Chancellery until 1945. Then it disappeared. It came back in 1980, when the Nationalgalerie bought it, and it hangs in the Alte Nationalgalerie on Museum Island now.
From this version on, Böcklin put his initials on the island, AB over the door of a tomb in the right-hand cliff. Move the light there. He gave himself a grave on it.
Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead
In Paris in 1907 Sergei Rachmaninoff saw a black and white reproduction of the painting. He’d been looking for a subject for a symphonic poem for a long time, and in the first months of 1909 he wrote Isle of the Dead, Op. 29, and conducted its first performance in Moscow that spring. It starts with the oars. A figure in bars of five beats rocks under the music like a boat on water, and near the end the Dies irae, the old chant for the dead, comes through.
Later he saw the painting in color. “If I had seen the original first, I might not have composed my Isle of the Dead. I like the picture best in black and white.”
Drag it across and you can hear why. In color the first island is warm, the rock gone gold against the blue. In black and white the warmth goes, and what’s left is the white of the figure against the black of the trees, the arrival and the dark it’s arriving into, which is what the music is about.
Isle of the Dead in film, from Val Lewton to Alien: Covenant
The producer Val Lewton hung the painting on a wall in I Walked with a Zombie (1943), then built a whole film around it. Isle of the Dead (1945), directed by Mark Robson for RKO with Boris Karloff as a Greek general, opens with the painting behind its title credits, and Leigh Harline’s score borrows themes from Rachmaninoff’s tone poem. So the music written from a black and white print ended up under a black and white film named after the painting.
It turns up again in Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant (2017). On the Engineers’ planet there’s a grave the android David says he made for Elizabeth Shaw, and the film historian Luke McKernan points out that for the few seconds it’s on screen, the scenery behind it is a clear imitation of Böcklin’s island. The line from the painting to Alien runs back further than that. H. R. Giger, whose designs gave the 1979 film its creature, painted his own Hommage à Böcklin in 1977, the island redrawn in his biomechanical style.
Why Isle of the Dead feels haunted
Go back to that letter. Böcklin promised a stillness you’d be afraid to break, and every part of the picture holds it. The water is flat enough to keep the reflection of the rock. The figure has its back to you, so you never get a face, and you’re left out on the water behind the boat, watching it arrive.
Haunted is the right word for it. A haunted place is one where something seems about to happen and never does, and Böcklin built exactly that: a crossing that is always nearly over, made for a widow, painted again and again without the boat ever touching the shore.
Crowned In Ashes holds the same kind of stillness in the opposite setting. A pale marble face with its eyes lowered stays perfectly calm while fire and embers eat into it from below, a night sky of stars behind it, and its words read “They’ll remember the blaze, but not the stillness in his face.”
Frequently asked questions
How many versions of Isle of the Dead are there?
Böcklin painted five between 1880 and 1886. Four survive: Basel (1880), the Metropolitan Museum in New York (1880), the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1883) and the Museum der bildenden Künste in Leipzig (1886). The fourth, from 1884, was lost in the Second World War and survives only as a black and white photograph. A sixth, finished by his son Carlo Böcklin in 1901, is in the Hermitage in St Petersburg.
Where is the original Isle of the Dead?
The first version is in the Kunstmuseum Basel, on deposit from the Gottfried Keller-Stiftung since 1920. The one Böcklin made for Marie Berna, a few weeks later, is in the Met in New York.
What does the Isle of the Dead painting mean?
Böcklin never explained it. Marie Berna asked for a picture to dream over, as a memorial to her husband, and he told her it would hold a stillness she’d be shy to break with a loud word. Many people read the oarsman as Charon carrying a soul to the underworld.
Why did Rachmaninoff write Isle of the Dead?
He saw a black and white reproduction of the painting in Paris in 1907 and wrote his symphonic poem, Op. 29, in 1909. When he later saw the painting in color he said, “If I had seen the original first, I might not have composed my Isle of the Dead. I like the picture best in black and white.”
Did Hitler own the Isle of the Dead?
The third version, from 1883, went to the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in 1936, according to the Nationalgalerie’s provenance record, and stayed there until 1945. It was one of Hitler’s favorite paintings. It went missing at the end of the war, and the Nationalgalerie bought it in 1980.
Read next
- Goya’s Black Paintings, explained, art made for no audience, on the walls of his own house.
- Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, one small figure, an infinite landscape.
- Vanitas meaning, why dying things look beautiful: the skull you can only see from the side, and the painter in the glass ball.
- Why Nighthawks feels lonely, the diner with no door.
References
- Kunstmuseum Basel, Die Toteninsel (Erste Fassung), inv. 1055, catalogue text with Böcklin’s letters of 19 May and 29 June 1880: sammlungonline.kunstmuseumbasel.ch
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Island of the Dead, 26.90, catalogue text and audio guide with Alison Hokanson: metmuseum.org
- Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Die Toteninsel, NG 2/80, provenance and text by Angelika Wesenberg: id.smb.museum
- German History in Documents and Images, German Historical Institute, “Arnold Böcklin, The Isle of the Dead (1883)” and “Die Toteninsel (1883)”: germanhistorydocs.org
- Birgit Schwarz, Geniewahn. Hitler und die Kunst, Vienna, Böhlau, 2009, pp. 152 ff.
- Sergei Bertensson and Jay Leyda, with Sophia Satina, Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music, New York University Press, 1956; Indiana University Press, 2001, pp. 154–156 (the reproduction in Paris, 1907, and “I like the picture best in black and white”).
- Barrie Martyn, Rachmaninoff: Composer, Pianist, Conductor, Aldershot, Scolar Press, 1990, pp. 203–206.
- John Coulthart, “A Picture to Dream Over: The Isle of the Dead,” Tor.com, 28 October 2011: reactormag.com
- Luke McKernan, “Isle of the Dead,” 26 August 2026 (Lewton, I Walked with a Zombie, Alien: Covenant): lukemckernan.com
- Images: the first version, Kunstmuseum Basel, deposit of the Gottfried Keller-Stiftung; the second, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (CC0); the third, Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; the fourth, a photograph of the lost painting; the fifth, Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig; Max Klinger’s etching, 1890. All public domain, via the museums and Wikimedia Commons.