Isles of the Dead

Brace yourselves for a little cultcha! It's my last week at my job, and I'm cleaning random stuff out of my computer. There was a time when I was the only person uploading pictures on this blog, and while searching for something to illustrate JPX's review of Isle of the Dead, I came across a couple of these paintings.

As you can see, they're pretty similar to each other, but they're different enough that I spotted it when I was looking at a search page full of thumbnails. Adding to the mystery was the fact that lovable lunatic H.R. Giger had painted a version as well. Weird, I thought, and I gathered the various specimens in a photo file.

Last week I consulted good old Wikipedia and found the answer, which is that all of them were painted by the same guy: Swiss painter Arnold Bocklin. (There should be an umlaut over the o in Bocklin.)

They were painted in the 1880's, an all but the one below are hanging up somewhere. That poor fellow was destoryed in Rotterdam in WWII. This image I had to get from Toteninsel.net, a site dedicated to this series of paintings.


As you probably guessed, this last one is the H.R. Giger painting. It's entitled "Bocklin."