Arnold Böcklin: Isle of the Dead (1880 – 6)

Version I, 1880, oil on canvas, 111 x 115 cm
Bâle, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Kunstmuseum, since 1920

Version II, 1880, oil on board, 74 x 122 cm
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Reisinger Fund, since 1926

Version III, 1883, oil on board, 80 x 150 cm
Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, since 1980

[Photograph of] Version IV, 1884, oil on copper, 81 x 151 cm
Lugano, Sammlung Schlss Rohoncz, destroyed in Rotterdam during WWII

Version V, 1886, oil on board, 80 x 150 cm
Leipzig, Museum der bildenden Künste, since 1886

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JG Ballard: The Atrocity Exhibition (1970): Chapter Four: ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’:

Impressions of Africa. A low shoreline; air glazed like amber; derricks and jetties above brown water; the silver geometry of a petrochemical complex, a Vorticist assemblage of cylinders and cubes superimposed upon the distant plateau of mountains; a single Horton sphere — engimatic balloon tethered to the fused sand by its steel cradles; the unique clarity of the African light: fluted tablelands and jigsaw bastions; the limitless neural geometry of the landscape.

Ballard’s annotation (1990):

Impressions of Africa.
Raymond Roussel (1877 – 1933), author of Impressions of Africa and Locus Solus, travelled with a coffin in which he would lie for a short time each day, preparing himself for death. Graveyards and cemeteries have the same calming effect, the more ornate the better. A visit to Père Lachaise in Paris adds a year to one’s life, and the pyramids in Egypt stare down time itself. It would be intriguing to construct a mausoleum that was an exact replica, in the most funereal stone, of one’s own home, even including the interior furniture (reminiscent of Magritte’s strange stone paintings, with their stone men and women, stone trees and stone birds). One could weekend in this alternate home, and probably soon find oneself stepping out of time.
……….On the mortuary island of San Michele, in the Venice lagoon, a gloomy and threatening place that inspired Arnold Böcklin’s ‘Island of the Dead,’ one comes across an extraordinary parade of ultra-modern bungalows among the graves and tombs, with white walls and wrought iron grilles, like demonstration models of a Spanish-style nightclub waiting shipment to the Costa Del Sol. These are family mausoleums, and it’s touching to see the coffins sitting together in the breakfast rooms.