Self-portrait with fiddling death
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| Self-portrait with fiddling death |
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| Arnold Böcklin , 1872 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 75 × 61 cm |
| National Gallery, State Museums of Prussian Cultural Heritage, Berlin |
Self-Portrait with Fiddling Death is a painting by Arnold Böcklin from 1872 . It is now in the National Gallery, State Museums of Prussian Cultural Heritage, Berlin. It was first exhibited in the Münchner Kunstverein in 1872 and established Arnold Böcklin's reputation in the Munich art community.
Image content
The self-portrait was made during Arnold Böcklin's time in Munich. It shows the artist with a brush and a painter's palette, his gaze goes beyond the viewer, seemingly into the distance. However, his attention is directed to the figure of Death, which hugs him from the black background over his left shoulder. Böcklin listens to his violin, which has only one, the lowest G-string.
The artist wears a high-necked, dark jacket. Underneath he wears a white shirt with a high collar. There are similar self-portraits of Arnold Böcklin from his time in Rome between 1863 and 1864. Unlike then and on his self-portrait from 1878, which is in the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt , he has a full beard in this portrait. Similar self-portraits were made in 1875/1876 (today Hamburger Kunsthalle ) and 1893 ( Kunstmuseum Basel ).
The model for the self-portrait was a portrait of the English nobleman Sir Bryan Tuke, which was still attributed to Hans Holbein the Younger by Arnold Böcklin during his lifetime and is in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. In this painting a skeleton with an hourglass stands behind the sitter.
classification
Arnold Böcklin has addressed death throughout his career. One of the most famous of his paintings is Die Toteninsel , which was available in a total of five versions. Four of them are still hanging in various museums around the world, the fifth version was lost during the Second World War . His plague paintings also deal with death.
Böcklin's self-portrait with fiddling death inspired several of his artist colleagues to paint similar things. These include the self-portrait with the death of Hans Thoma from 1875 in the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe, and the painting Self-portrait with a skeleton by Lovis Corinth from 1896 that is hanging in the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich .
The writer Wolf Justin Hartmann (1894–1969) probably influenced the picture for his tetralogy Die Schicksalsgeige , published between 1938 and 1956 , which includes the novels Durst (1938), Mann im Mars (1940), Das Parrotiennest (1948) and Das Spiel an der Sulva (1956) includes. In each of these four novels, death as the main actor plays a different string, the sound of which the author prefixed the text.
literature
- Angelika Wesenberg : "Memento vivere". Böcklin's self-portrait with fiddling death. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Dumont, 2002, ISBN 3-8321-7228-9 .
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art: German Masters of the Nineteenth Century: Paintings and Drawings from the Federal Republic of Germany. Harry N. Abrams, New York 1981, ISBN 0-87099-263-5 .