Cour centrale de l'Île des morts (obsession reconstitutive d'après Böcklin) (Central Courtyard from The Isle of the Dead (Reconstructive Obsession after Böcklin)), 1934

Painted in 1934.

Dalí’s Cour centrale de l’Île des morts (obsession reconstitutive d’après Böcklin) (1934) revisits the Swiss Symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin’s (1827–1901) most celebrated subject, The Isle of the Dead. Drawing inspiration from the elder artist, Dalí restaged Böcklin’s eerily disquieting scene as a triptych—the present work comprising the central panel.

In this painting, an incongruously luminous sky full of soft, silky clouds stands in stark contrast to the overarching sense of foreboding replete elsewhere in the composition. On the extreme left of the canvas stands a hulking skeletal apparition in front of a crush of cypresses. Böcklin, too, had punctuated his paintings with the same trees, which have been symbols of death since antiquity. Cypresses were an important motif for Dalí, who not only saw their mournful connotations but also portrayed their erotic associations from his own subconscious. The impenetrable line of vegetation leads directly into a stone wall, which serves to further conceal the landscape beyond. A door partway across is rendered in such a manner that the secret of what lies behind remains ambiguous. Speaking to Dalí’s fascination with the psyche, the present work is a physical manifestation of both an ever-looming fear of death and the unknowable reality of what lies behind the veil in an afterlife.