Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle

A self-portrait by the Swiss Symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin, painted in 1872 in oil on canvas. Böcklin depicts himself listening as an allegorical figure of Death, reduced to a skeleton, playing a single-stringed violin behind his shoulder, an image reflecting on his own mortality. Böcklin first exhibited the painting at the Kunstverein München the same year, and mortality recurred across his later work, including his five versions of Isle of the Dead. The composer Gustav Mahler is said, by his wife Alma, to have drawn on this self-portrait when writing the scherzo of his Fourth Symphony. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/