Isle of Life

This little island bustles with activity that Arnold Böcklin painted in 1888 as a deliberate counterpart to his much more famous "Isle of the Dead." Where that earlier work is silent and somber, this one is full of warmth and motion. Figures in colorful robes gather on the grassy rise, swans paddle through the water, and a red-haired woman rides forward on some kind of creature while others bathe near a rocky arch. Palm trees and slender poplars reach into a sky packed with rolling clouds.

Böcklin was a Swiss painter known for dreamlike scenes drawn from myth and imagination rather than real places. He often paired ideas together, and here he clearly wanted to show life as the opposite of death, crowded and busy where the other island stood empty. The mood comes from the mix of movement and color, the bathers and swans and celebrating figures all sharing one small patch of land. It is a strange, crowded little world, and part of the fun is trying to work out exactly what everyone is doing.