Spring Evening

From 1874 Böcklin lived in Florence. There he met Hans von Marées, with whom he travelled to southern Italy in 1879. In the same year Böcklin painted Spring Evening, a composition of elegiac atmosphere. In a slightly earlier version, which was closest in its details to the Budapest version, but has since disappeared, Pan plays a transverse flute. In another, somewhat more static picture, painted a year later and now in the Kunsthaus, Zürich, the compsition is reversed. In the 1890s Böcklin revived the idea of the scene with Pan playing to woodland nymphs in three versions, which are similar to each other but significantly different from the earlier ones. Ferenc Tóth