Ocean Breakers (The Sound)

The sea features as a motif in Böcklin’s work after the 1870s. It is always inhabited by creatures from mythology — naiads, tritons, nereids. He had already painted a work called Ocean Breakers in 1877 with a stylized, more schematic female figure (now in the Kunsthaus, Zurich) which bears a striking formal resemblance to one on an engraving by Salomon Gessner: Melida, Yearning, with her Sheep on the Lonely Island. Both works have clear echoes of the Lorelei of Clemens Brentano’s novel Godwi, who only came into being in 1801 but quickly became popular as the dangerous temptress on the rocks high above the Rhine. Romantic water spirits, nymphs, and mermaids populate nineteenth-century art and literature. Böcklin himself stated that in this work he wanted to translate the acoustic phenomenon of the breakers into painting. What may be sensed through the represented landscape is personified in the figure of the woman with the harp, which has strings that are not only very long and strong, but are all the same length — “For the sound of the breakers is always the same,” as Böcklin explained to a friend in 1879 ( Böcklin was presumably thinking of a so called aeolian harp). A similar representation of the sounds of the sea is the subject of the picture Triton, Blowing on a Shell (1879–80). In its format and composition, and above all in the figure of the triton, turning to the left, it could be a companion piece to Ocean Breakers.