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Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead remains one of the most haunting images of nineteenth-century Symbolism: a silent island surrounded by dark water, a narrow boat approaching its rocky shore, and a white-shrouded figure standing beside what appears to be a coffin. Böcklin never gives the viewer a clear narrative. Instead, the painting exists somewhere between landscape, dream and funerary procession.

Few, if any, painters of the late nineteenth century returned so relentlessly to temptation, fear, sexuality, mythology, and the supernatural as Franz von Stuck.

Born in Bavaria in 1863, Stuck became one of the defining figures of German Symbolism. His paintings are theatrical and often deliberately unsettling: Lucifer staring directly out at the viewer, serpents curling around pale bodies, Medusa caught somewhere between beauty and terror, centaurs fighting beneath dark skies, and allegorical figures that seem to emerge from another world.

Aubrey Beardsley transformed the strange, sensual, and grotesque into some of the most recognizable black-and-white imagery of the 1890s. From his infamous Salome illustrations to The Yellow Book and Le Morte Darthur, his work helped define the visual language of decadence while influencing generations of illustrators, designers, and artists.

Max Klinger understood that some images belong to daylight and others belong somewhere much darker.

The German artist, born in Leipzig in 1857, worked as a painter and sculptor, but it was in printmaking that his imagination became truly strange. Across elaborate cycles of etchings, engravings, aquatints and mezzotints, Klinger constructed private worlds filled with desire, anxiety, erotic obsession, death, myth and dream.

Félicien Rops is one of those artists who seems to have wandered into the nineteenth century carrying news from a much stranger time. Born in Namur, Belgium, in 1833, he began conventionally enough: school, art lessons, university in Brussels, caricatures, marriage, respectable connections. But respectability never really suited the Artist. As a young man he helped found the satirical journal Uylenspiegel, drawing political and social cartoons, and by the 1860s he was spending more and more time in Paris learning printmaking and drifting toward the literary underground. By 1875 he had settled there permanently. Paris gave Rops exactly what he needed: writers, publishers, prostitutes, dandies, skeptics, nightlife, collectors, cafés, bad reputations, and an audience that could still be scandalized.