Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle

Painting by Arnold Böcklin

Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle

Year	1872
Medium	oil on canvas
Dimensions	75 cm × 61 cm (30 in × 24 in)
Location	Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle is a painted self-portrait executed in 1872 by the Swiss symbolist artist Arnold Böcklin. He first exhibited at the Kunstverein München in the same year, establishing his reputation in Munich's artistic community. It is now in the Alte Nationalgalerie, in Berlin.

Painted in Munich, the painting depicts a bearded Böcklin stalked by a personification of death playing a single-stringed violin in an intimation of his mortality. It is an echo of an earlier painting of Sir Brian Tuke by an anonymous painter c.1540, part of the collection of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, in which the shadowing figure of Death is pointing at an hourglass.

Death and mortality is a repeating theme in several of Böcklin's works, including Plague, two versions of War, and five versions of Isle of the Dead.

According to Alma Mahler, the wife of the composer Gustav Mahler, her husband was "under the spell" of Böcklin's self-portrait when writing the scherzo movement of his Fourth Symphony.

References

"Selbstbildnis mit fiedelndem Tod". Alte Nationalgalerie. Retrieved 13 July 2020.
Steinberg, Michael (1995). The Symphony: A Listener's Guide. Oxford University Press. p. 303. ISBN 978-0-19-506177-2.

v t e Arnold Böcklin
Paintings	List of paintings Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle (1872) Roger Freeing Angelica (1873) Spring Evening (1879) The Sanctuary of Hercules (1884) Isle of the Dead (1880–1901) The Homecoming (1887) War (1896) Odysseus and Polyphemus (1896) Plague (1898)
Related	Arnold Böcklin Vier Tondichtungen nach A. Böcklin (four poems songs)

Death and mortality in art

Themes

Forms

Music	Dirge Funeral march Keening Requiem Threnody
Poetry	Death poem Elegy Elegiac Pastoral elegy Obituary poetry

Artwork

Architecture	Capuchin Crypt Catacombs of Paris Sedlec Ossuary Capuchin catacombs of palermo
Film	The Seventh Seal
Literature	Ars moriendi Bardo Thodol Book of Job Book of the Dead Left Ginza Hamlet's soliloquy The Masque of the Red Death
Music	Danse macabre Death and Transfiguration Der Tod und das Mädchen Erlkönig Totentanz
Painting	Et in Arcadia ego Guercino Poussin Death and Fire Death and Life Death and the Maiden Death and the Miser Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May La Calavera Catrina Plague Pyramid of Skulls Roman Widow Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette Sleep and His Half-Brother Death The Ambassadors The Garden of Death The Shadow of Death The Three Ages of Man and Death The Triumph of Death
Poetry	"And death shall have no dominion" "Because I could not stop for Death" "Erlkönig" "Do not go gentle into that good night"

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References