Böcklin painted five versions of this image between 1880 and 1886. The repetition is the first thing to notice. He did not work on the picture, sell it, and move on; he made it again, then again, then again. The subject would not let him alone. He gave no narrative explanation for the recurrence beyond calling the work a Traumbild, a dream image. The viewer is supplied with the elements: a small rowing boat, a standing white-shrouded figure, an apparent coffin, a rocky island ringed by cypresses, water that does not move. The viewer is asked to assemble the rest.

The cypresses are the key. They are the trees Mediterranean cemeteries plant beside their gates, and they are also the trees Roman poets used for funerary similes. Böcklin places them in two compositional columns rising from the centre of the island, framing a dark vertical passage between them. The boat aims for that passage. Everything in the painting (the height of the cypresses, the depth of the cliffs around them, the stillness of the water) is engineered to make the passage feel like the only way through.

The painting became one of the most reproduced images in late-nineteenth-century European bourgeois homes, printed and re-printed across Germany and Switzerland. The reproduction was always black and white. Rachmaninoff, who composed a symphonic poem after the painting in 1907, said the colour original disappointed him when he finally saw it. The grey print, more than the painting, was what had haunted him. A painting that travels better as its own reproduction is a painting whose argument lives in the composition, not in the surface. Böcklin was making an image, not a canvas.