The story behind the painting
Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle
Death leans over Böcklin's shoulder and plays the fiddle while the artist listens with palette and brush in hand.
- In 1872, Böcklin painted himself at work. But he isn’t alone.
- His work has stopped. His eyes slide sideways, as if someone just spoke.
- It’s Death, so close its skull nearly touches his hair.
- And Death is playing a fiddle with only one string: the lowest.
- Watch those bony fingers. Whatever this song is, it’s for him alone.
- Yet the brush stays in his hand. Death has his ear, but not his brush.
Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle is an 1872 painting by the Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin in which a skeleton plays a fiddle behind the painter, who pauses with brush and palette to listen; it hangs in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
What does Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle show?
Böcklin pauses with a brush in one hand and a palette in the other. His eyes turn aside as a skeleton leans close behind him, playing a fiddle. The tools identify him as a painter; the second figure brings mortality into the self-portrait.
Painted in 1872, the work places both figures against a dark, nearly empty background. There is little distance between the living face and the skull. Warm skin, pale bone and dark clothing make their different surfaces unusually clear.
Why is Death playing the fiddle?
The artist's expression is alert rather than openly terrified. His held brush and sideways glance suggest an interruption, a moment of listening. The image does not tell us exactly what he thinks, but it makes his attention part of the subject.
Death appears close enough for the skull to almost touch the painter's head. The fiddle brings the imagined sound into that narrow space. A familiar musical action makes the personification of death feel present rather than remote.
The museum identifies the fiddle's only string as its lowest, tuned to G. That detail gives the imagined music a particular register. It also turns the portrait into an image of listening: a painter's face responds to something a silent canvas cannot make audible.
What does the skeleton mean?
The scene draws on the memento mori tradition, in which a skull or skeleton reminds the living of death. Böcklin combines that familiar sign with the tools of his profession. Artistic work and awareness of mortality occupy the same small space.
The Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, which bought the painting in 1898, notes that Böcklin painted it in Munich. He knew Hans Holbein the Younger’s images of the Dance of Death and the remains of the famous Dance of Death in his home town, Basel, so the memento mori tradition was familiar to him. (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie)
Yet the museum stresses that the painter is not frightened: he listens, and Death does not take the brush from his hand. It reads the pause as a moment of inspiration, a new twist on the old memento mori, and quotes an 1898 review in the journal Pan that heard in the picture not a memento mori but a ‘memento vivere’, a reminder to live. (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie)
How did Böcklin compose the self-portrait?
The darkness makes the brush, palette, face and fiddle stand out. Bony fingers emerge beside the artist's shoulder, near the instrument. With no expansive setting to lead the eye elsewhere, our attention moves between the painter and the figure behind him.
The self-portrait remains suspended in a pause. Böcklin holds the means to continue working, but he is listening at this moment. The picture leaves art-making and the awareness of death beside each other without turning that relationship into a simple instruction.
Who was Arnold Böcklin?
Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) was a Swiss painter from Basel who became one of the leading Symbolists of the late nineteenth century, working in Italy and Germany for much of his life. In 1872 he was living in Munich, where he painted this self-portrait and first showed it at the Munich Kunstverein, an exhibition that helped establish his reputation in the city. (Wikipedia)
Death runs through his work. Besides this self-portrait he painted The Plague, two versions of War and five versions of Isle of the Dead, the brooding island of cypresses that became his best-known image. (Wikipedia)
What inspired the painting?
The picture echoes an earlier portrait of Sir Brian Tuke, made around 1540 after Hans Holbein the Younger and now in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek, in which Death stands behind the sitter and points to an hourglass. Holbein, whose The Ambassadors hides a stretched skull in plain sight, is the same artist whose Dance of Death images Böcklin knew from Basel.
The Alte Nationalgalerie also points to Böcklin’s reading. He liked the writer Jean Paul, who compared genius to the string of an Aeolian harp that plays itself, and in the 1870s he occasionally quoted the pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, so the picture can also be read in a darker key. (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie)
How did the painting come to Berlin?
The self-portrait passed through Berlin collections, including that of Adolph von Liebermann, and through auctions before reaching the Basel collector La Roche-Ringwald. The Nationalgalerie bought it from him in 1898, while Böcklin was still alive, and the review in Pan that hailed it as a ‘memento vivere’ followed that purchase. (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie)
Did the painting influence music?
According to Alma Mahler, the composer Gustav Mahler took inspiration from this painting for the scherzo of his Fourth Symphony. He first titled the movement ‘Freund Hein spielt auf’ (Friend Hein, a German folk name for Death, strikes up), and its solo violin is retuned so that Death’s fiddling sounds harsh and strange. (Wikipedia)
The details at a glance
See it in person
Alte Nationalgalerie · Berlin
Check display, special dates and entry conditions.
Official visitor information ↗Sources and further reading
- Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle — Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie
- Artist biography: Arnold Böcklin (Wikipedia, English)
- Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle (Wikipedia, English)