A small boat crosses still, dark water toward a rocky island. A ferryman rows. Standing in the boat is a figure wrapped in white, beside a coffin draped in cloth. Ahead, tall cypress trees rise from the centre of the island, and doorways are carved into its cliffs.

Böcklin, a Swiss painter, never explained the picture. He called it "a dream picture" and painted five versions between 1880 and 1886, each slightly different.

It became one of the most popular images of its time, reproduced in prints that hung in thousands of homes. The composer Sergei Rachmaninoff saw a black-and-white reproduction and wrote a brooding symphonic poem named after it in 1909. It is the quietest painting in this room, and somehow one of the eeriest.