Bocklin lost eight of his fourteen children. Isle of the Dead, the painting that made him the most famous artist in late nineteenth-century Germany, partly evokes the English Cemetery in Florence, where his baby daughter Maria was buried. He painted five versions between 1880 and 1886; a sixth was begun with his son Carlo and completed by Carlo after his father's death. The title was given by an art dealer, not by Bocklin, who described the image only as "a dream picture: it must produce such a stillness that one would be awed by a knock on the door".

He was born in Basel in 1827 and studied in Dusseldorf, Antwerp, Brussels and Paris, but found his real inspiration in Italy, where he lived intermittently and where he spent his final years. His landscapes are not observed but invented: mythological creatures inhabit rocky coastlines, centaurs stand in forests, mermaids play in the sea. The Romanticism of his training was filtered through Italian light and classical allusion into a Symbolism that anticipated both the Metaphysical painters and the Surrealists.

Isle of the Dead hung in reproduction in seemingly every middle-class home in Germany at the turn of the century. Sigmund Freud kept a copy in his office. When Marcel Duchamp was asked to name his favourite painter, he named Bocklin, whether sincerely or provocatively remains unclear.

Bocklin also painted a counterpart, Island of Life (1888), which has remained far less well known. He died in San Domenico di Fiesole, near Florence, in 1901, at seventy-three.