Ruin by the Sea (1881): Art, History and Details

Ruin by the Sea (1881) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Arnold Böcklin (Swiss, 1827–1901).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The dark, ruined villa in this painting is made especially mysterious by the strange cypress trees tossed by the wind. A nervous green light flickers through the scene. Influenced by German Romantic art of the early 1800s, Böcklin was preoccupied with dreamlike images suggestive of death.

Object facts

• Title: Ruin by the Sea
• Date: 1881
• Creator attribution: Arnold Böcklin (Swiss, 1827–1901)
• Culture: Switzerland
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Framed: 132.1 x 102.9 x 8.3 cm (52 x 40 1/2 x 3 1/4 in.); Unframed: 111 x 82 cm (43 11/16 x 32 5/16 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1979.57

A detail from the museum

Who used to live in this crumbling villa on a lonely shore? Böcklin's eerie painting seems to beg the question of the building's history and the circumstances of its ruin. Haunted by the past, this scene also contains premonitions of future peril.

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. "The Year in Review for 1979." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 67, no. 3 (1980): 58-99.
• Henning, Edward B. “‘Metaphysical Interior’: An Early Painting by Giorgio de Chirico.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 70, no. 4 (April 1983): 138–146.
• Argencourt, Louise d', and Roger Diederen. Catalogue of Paintings. Pt. 4. European Paintings of the 19th Century. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1974.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.