Play of the Nereides

Böcklin painted this work in his mature Basel and Florence period, when he had decisively turned from the landscape conventions of his training under Johann Wilhelm Schirmer toward a personal mythological idiom rooted in antique sources but entirely reimagined on his own terms. The Nereides, sea-nymphs of Greek mythology, daughters of the sea-god Nereus, had been a subject for academic painters throughout the 19th century, but Böcklin renders them without the porcelain finish and decorous arrangement of Academic Realism: his figures are physical, ungainly in their exuberance, and wholly at home in an elemental sea. This directness, combined with his commitment to allegory and the dreamlike weight of mythological narrative, places his work squarely within Symbolism, a movement of which he was one of the defining precursors even before the French critics codified it. The painting was received with the mixture of admiration and puzzlement that greeted much of Böcklin's work in German-speaking Europe; later, figures including Sigmund Freud and Giorgio de Chirico would cite him as a touchstone, and his reputation underwent a revival in the 20th century precisely because of the psychological charge his mythological scenes carry beneath their antique surface.