Page 50 - Gallery 19C Nazarenes Catalogues

2 2 PROVENANCE EXHIBITED May 1988; Berlin, Nationalgalerie, LITERATURE
29 May–10 August 1998, Arnold
Arnold Böcklin E. Jung, Winterthur, by 1898 Basel, Kunsthalle, Basler Böcklin, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Mendelsohn 1901, 32–34, 78, 107
SWISS-GER M AN, 1827–1901 Hans Reinhart, Winterthur, Kunstverein, Böcklin-Jubiläums- Ernst: Eine Reise ins Ungewisse, Schmid 1903, no. 40
Woermann1912, vol. 2, 157
Ausstellung, 1897, no.13
1939 Lilly Edelmann-Nager,
MOONLIT LANDSCAPE WITH A RUIN Switzerland, 1963 Winterthur, Kunstmuseum, no. 7, 436, ill. 134 Hamann 1914, 188-189
Basel, Kunstmuseum, 19 May-26
signed A. Böcklin and dated 1849 (lower right) Thence by descent (and sold: Der Winterthurer Privatbesitz, August 2001; Paris, Musée d’Orsay, (as Reiter im Mondschein)
oil on canvas Sotheby’s, London, September-October 1942, no. 35, 17 23 October 2001–13 January 2002; Kleineberg 1971, 41, 42, 44, 185
9 ¹/₂ by 12 ³/₄ in. (24.5 by 32.5 cm) 23 November 2010, lot 4) Basel, Kunstmuseum, Basler Rolf Andree, Arnold Böcklin,
Private Collection, California Kunstverein, Arnold Böcklin: Munich, Neue Pinakothek, 14 Basel and Munich, 1977, no. 55, 202
(acquired at the above sale) Gemälde, Plastiken. Ausstellung February-26 May 2002, Arnold
zum 150 Geburtstag, 11 June-11 Böcklin, no. 5, 148
September 1977, no. 25 El Segundo, Museum of Art, 13
Zürich, Kunsthaus, 3 October October 2014–1 February 2015
1997–18 January 1998; Munich,
Haus der Kunst, 3 February-3

When Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) completed his symbolist masterpiece, captures the traumatic experience of the doomed eponym of Goethe’s
The Isle of the Dead in 1880, he was arguably the most famous contemporary 1782 poem, who, chased by forces unknown “through the night dark Cat. 2a Arnold Böcklin, Isle of the Dead, 1880, oil on
artist in the German-speaking world (Cat. 2a). ¹ Few have failed to point and drear,” will not be able to save his infant son. ² We feel the father’s canvas, 111 × 155 cm, Kunstmuseum Basel
out the Romantic roots of the image’s mysterious ambiguity or the subliminal primordial terror, as we watch the dark silhouette of Böcklin’s rider Cat. 2b Arnold Böcklin, Villa by the Sea, 1865, oil and tempera on canvas,
unease conjured up by the imaginary landscapes that preceded it (Cat. 2b). Yet galloping “with terror half wild,” as Goethe had it, across the storm- Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Sammlung Schack, Munich
decidedly more have failed to acknowledge their Düsseldorf origins. The ridden landscape, and it hardly surprises us that he would return
little formal training Böcklin had, he received at the Düsseldorf Academy, three decades later in the even more macabre scenario of Death’s Ride Cat. 2c Carl Gustav Carus, The Erlking, 1825, oil on canvas,
where he studied under Johann Wilhelm Schirmer (1807–1863) between (Schack-Galerie, Munich). Yet for all our unsettling premonitions, we 71 × 54 cm, destroyed in the 1931 fire of the Glaspalast, Munich
1845 and 1847. Although brief, the experience proved transformative, look in vain for the Erlking’s child in the moonlit landscape. Suggestive
and not merely for adopting Schirmer’s predilection for dramatic as it may be, the literary reference is but pure speculation. Like Carl ¹ See Justine Hopkins’s article on the artist in The Oxford Companion to
cloud formations and obsession with expressive groups of trees. Above Friedrich Lessing before him, Arnold Böcklin, too, leaves us guessing. Western Art. Böcklin painted a total of six versions in quick succession:
all, Böcklin fell in love with the kind of cryptic storytelling that Carl May 1880 (Kunstmuseum, Basel); June 1880 (Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Friedrich Lessing (1808–1880) had so successfully explored in his 1830 And guessing we will! Drawn into the scene by garish light illuminating New York); 1883 (Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin); 1884
(destroyed in Berlin during World War II); 1886 (Museum der bildenden
hit canvas, The Mourning Royal Couple (see Fig. 15). By the time the Swiss the overgrown ruin, we hurry through the landscape in search of Künste, Leipzig); see for images https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_the_
painter had arrived at the Rhine, the mysterious anthropomorphism meaning. Soon, the crumbled church turns into a somber metaphor for Dead_(painting).
of Lessing’s soul-painting had made its way into landscape as well. the passing of time and the inescapable demise of all things terrestrial, ² The Erlking belongs to the most famous among the Gothic poems of the
Böcklin picked up where his mentor had left off, and delivered in 1849 not least of ourselves. The rider and billowing clouds chased across young Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832); see Goethe 1782.
the first of his works which explicitly prompts us to associate freely the sky by the impending tempest add to this mood of transience. Yet
what the narrative might be. As such, The Moonlit Landscape with Ruin for all its timeless universality, this Romantic memento mori might also
is not only a key work in Böcklin’s oeuvre, but a key to his work. have held a more personal meaning for the artist. Only a year before
the canvas’s completion, Böcklin had witnessed the bloody events
Böcklin painted this charged early landscape when merely twenty- of the 1848-Revolution in Paris firsthand. Their violence left a deep
two. With its distinctly Romantic overtones, the painting synthesized impression on the Swiss artist, who went on to distill the autobiographical
his most formative artistic influences, from his Düsseldorf mentors, moment into an image of our collective human experience. Not
Schirmer and Lessing, to the German Romantic painters more generally surprisingly, the Moonlit Landscape with Ruin became a prototype that
and in particular Carl Blechen (1798–1840), Caspar David Friedrich Böcklin would return to again and again over his long career and that
(1774–1840) and Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869). Indeed, Carus’s 1825 finally led him to the enigmatic journey to his haunting Isle of the Dead.
rendition of the Erlking is often cited as an immediate model (Cat. 2c).
The agitated and stirring atmosphere of Böcklin’s landscape certainly

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