Spring in a Narrow Gorge

Large, solid boulders and sheer rock walls frame a slight opening at the end of a gorge, where dark silhouetted trees meet the pale sky. The gloom picks out the single bright green birch at the centre; the narrow canyon lies mostly in shadow, only flickers of white light reaching through to dapple the streambed and trace the trunks, while tiny blue and yellow flowers fleck the moss along the path in the foreground. The Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin spent years studying and sketching nature, and the scene is not a portrait of any one place but an invented one, composed to carry a mood — calm, and a little foreboding. There are no people, animals or myths here to supply a story; light, colour and the architecture of the rocks do all the work. The Symbolist painters of the 1890s and the Surrealists of the 1920s would each look back to Böcklin as a founding ancestor. The painting is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum.