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Arnold Böcklin • 1872
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. In this self-portrait, Death is playing on the lowest string, tuned to G, which is here also the only string of the fiddle. The painter, alert, has paused in his work. Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle is the most celebrated self-portrait in the tradition of German and Swiss Symbolism, and one of the defining images of the memento mori genre in nineteenth-century European art. It is simultaneously a meditation on mortality, an act of artistic autobiography, a contribution to the iconographic tradition of the danse macabre, and — according to the most charming biographical story attached to any self-portrait of the period — the product of a friend's idle question about what Böcklin appeared to be listening to.
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