Talk:Isle of the Dead (painting)

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Isn't it a little too far-fetched to use something Nabokov wrote as fiction as something he personally meant?

Seems that way. Removed it. Sign your comments with ~~~~ and join in on article improvement. Outriggr (talk) 00:17, 10 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

While we are at it, I am removing the references to the "female figure" and to the husband and wife. Although this information appears on the card next to the version of the painting at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, it is pure conjecture, and is also unreferenced. So far as I know, Boecklin himself gave no indication for such an interpretation (or any other).Pernoctus (talk) 02:14, 17 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Famous Admirers[edit]

"Freud, Lenin, and Clemenceau ^{[citation needed]} all had prints of it in their offices and it was known to be Adolf Hitler's favorite painting ^{[citation needed]}."

This is interesting and may well be true, but it shouldn't be in the main article without a source in case it's false. It's too factoid-y and could spread too easily. --Arvedui (talk) 15:16, 10 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Inspiration?[edit]

The footnote referring to a biography of Rachmaninoff is hardly convincing evidence for the claimed inspiration by the island Pondikonisi. St. George Island in the Bay of Kotor (Sveti Đorđe) is literally an "Isle of the Dead" (as there is a cemetery on it) and resembles the paintings much more closely than Pontikonisi, Ponza or Castello Aragonese (Aragonese_Castle), which have variously been cited as possible sources of inspiration. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rsbrux (talk • contribs) 18:20, 29 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There are several contesting islands that could have been the inspiration for the painting (Sveti Đorđe is a very good find!). But unless a reliable source appears, I think we will have to be content with not knowing exactly what inspired Böcklin. He used the landscape and architectural elements earlier, e.g. in Villa by the Sea, so he might have picked "the design" of the Isle of the Dead from just about any place(s). A gender scientist friend of mine pointed out that the painting depicts a small, white thing in the process of penetrating a bushy area between two thigh-like and skin coloured cliffs, so there are all kinds of possible inspirations. /James 2017-10-01

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Title[edit]

Isn't it The Isle of the Dead? After all, the German is Die Toteninsel, not just Toteninsel. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 09:46, 4 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The Sixth Version?[edit]

I cannot find any information or reference proving the existence of a sixth version, the Hermitage version. The websites of the Kunstmuseum Basel, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Alte Nationalgeleri of Berlin mention only five versions of this painting. And on the Hermitage's website there is no information that the museum owns a Böcklin painting. The information about the sixth version was added by Mrspeed (talk · contribs) the 18 November 2018, but no reference was inserted at that time.--Gotogo (talk) 08:48, 4 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Since no reference has ben added I will now deleete the mentioning of the sixthe version.--Gotogo (talk) 20:26, 17 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Gotogo: I also wondered about that. On 21 September 2021, an IP user re-added that version, still without a reference, so I'm going to remove it. If there is any proof that such a version exists and hangs in the Hermitage Museum (I actually was there in 2019 and spent quite a long time in the museum - I'm glad I did it then, afterwards it wouldn't have been possible first due to the pandemic, now Russia's war... - but didn't see this painting), it could of course be re-added with suitable references. Gestumblindi (talk) 23:10, 13 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

According to the Hermitage's website, there was a temporary exhibition in 2023:

It was customarily accepted that with the five canonical versions of the celebrated composition the artist exhausted his topic. However, according to the Thieme-Becker dictionary (Thieme U., Becker F. Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler. Vol. 4, Leipzig, 1910), in the autumn of 1900 Arnold Böcklin began to paint a sixth version of Isle of the Dead together with his son Carlo. The Hermitage picture has been identified as this work. [...] The work found its way to Russia most probably as a consequence of Carlo Böcklin’s marriage in 1899 to Nadezhda Gringmuth, the daughter of Vladimir Andreyevich Gringmuth, editor-in-chief of the Moskovskiye vedomosti newspaper.

Interesting that the info about Hermitage's sixth version was added in 2018, though. I guess there were multiple exhibitions of it in the past, but the only one documented on Hermitage's site is the 2023 one. CafuneAndChill (talk) 13:59, 19 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, that's an interesting link. So the sixth painting does exist, but maybe not much of it is painted by Arnold Böcklin himself - as the Hermitage site states, it is signed "A. Böcklin invenit [Devised by A. Böcklin] and Carlo Böcklin fecit 1901 [executed by Carlo Böcklin in 1901]". Something based on that Hermitage / Thieme-Becker information could certainly be added to the article, with these references. @Gotogo: What do you think? Gestumblindi (talk) 22:08, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Works inspired by[edit]

I can't find any official source referencing it, but two versions of Isle of the Dead appear in the 1995 point-and-click adventure game Dark Seed II, both heavily modified. Minxzb (talk) 09:57, 26 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]