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German Symbolist artist Sascha Schneider (1870–1927) created a strange visual world built from monumental bodies, spiritual conflict, fear and transformation. Masterfully working across painting, drawing, sculpture and illustration, Schneider developed an intensely allegorical style where the human figure became a symbol for psychological and supernatural forces.

Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865–1931) transformed the myths of the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic, into some of the most haunting images of Nordic art. Moving from realism toward Symbolism during the 1890s, Gallen-Kallela became deeply interested in folk poetry, spirituality, mythology, and what his museum describes as the “inner world of the human mind.” Rather than treating folklore as picturesque fantasy, his paintings often emphasize its harsher elements: death, vengeance, supernatural landscapes, doomed heroes, and resurrection. Gallen-Kallelan Museo

Explore the haunting, dreamlike work of Carlos Schwabe, a Swiss Symbolist artist known for mystical figures, dark romanticism, intricate natural forms, and allegorical visions of death, beauty, and transformation.

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.