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The water of the little river shimmers as it snakes across the rich green meadows. The poplar leaves wave slightly in the breeze, and we can hear the joyful echoing shouts of the children as they play in and by the water. The spreading blue sky over this soft summer landscape has an almost unreal beauty. The little town lies far away in the distance, as far away as the worries and cares of everyday life. Here at the river, life can be enjoyed in freedom and in harmony with nature – a state of paradise. Yet this idyllic life is not free from a touch of sadness. There seems to be something menacing lurking beneath the bright cheerfulness.

In fact, in this work Böcklin may well have combined the tragic events of his life with a vision of paradise as a timeless place where nature and humankind were one – as curator Heike Biedermann explains:

“When I see this painting, my personal thoughts are with the children of the artist.” [3:24–3:39] “Böcklin had 14 children, and eight of them died before they reached adulthood. From written biographical sources, we know just how much he suffered when he lost his children.”

Like his artist friends Anselm Feuerbach and Hans von Marées, Böcklin spent most of his creative years in Italy. He painted this Summer’s Day in Florence in 1881, the same year he finished the first version of the Island of the Dead, probably his most famous painting. In this creative period, Böcklin began to intensify the suggestive power of his compositions by reducing the formal compositional elements and applying brilliant, contrasting colours.

Here, he uses the reflection of the trees in the water to emphasise the vertical line. The brilliance of the blues is heightened by an intensive contrast to the dark green tones. The delicate figures of the children, only rendered schematically, stand out brightly against the green. Genderless and with no individual features, the figures only reinforce the melancholy mood underlying this landscape scene.

With his ambition of visualising inner life and mental states in his art, Arnold Böcklin advanced to become one of the leading precursors of symbolism.