Oil painting -> List of Painters -> Arnold Bocklin

Early days: Arnold Bocklin, a.k.a Arnold Boecklin, was born in 1827,in Basel, Switzerland. Arnold Böcklin studied and worked throughout northern Europe, Düsseldorf, Antwerp, Brussels, and Paris. Inspite of this,he found his real motivation in the landscape of Italy.He returned to Italy from time to time and he even spent his last years in this country.

Career:

Arnold Bocklin was a Swiss Symbolist painter whose moody landscapes and ominous allegories enormously influenced late 19th-century German artists.Böcklin initially won a  great reputation with the huge mural  “Pan in the Bulrushes” .This  mural  brought him the support of the King of Bavaria.He got an opportunity to teach at the Weimar Art School,but his heart was always set towards  Italian Landscapes. After an hiatus during which he finished his mythological frescoes for the decoration of the Public Art Collection, in Basel, he settled in Italy and only sporadically he returned to Germany in order  to experiment with flying machines.

In his last two decades,his work became ever more subjective, frequently depicting fabulous creatures or being based on dark allegorical themes, as in "Isle of the Dead" (1880), that was the inspiration for the symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead by the Russian composer Sergey Rachmaninoff. The spectral scenes depicted in  "Odysseus and Calypso" (1883) and "The Pest" (1898) reveals the morose symbolism that projected the so-called Freudian imagery of much 20th-century art.

He  passed away in Jan.16,1901  Fiesole  in Italy.

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