Whenever I see SF paperback covers by Paul Lehr like the nine I posted yesterday, and the many others he created in a similar vein, I immediately think of Arnold Böcklin’s “Isle of the Dead” paintings and, to a lesser extent, ”The Sacred Wood”:
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- ABOVE: Arnold Böcklin, The Isle of the Dead (1880).
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- ABOVE: Arnold Böcklin, The Isle of the Dead (1883).
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- ABOVE: Arnold Böcklin, The Isle of the Dead (1886).
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- ABOVE: Arnold Böcklin, The Sacred Wood (1882).
I was tempted to file the comparison between Böcklin and Lehr under “Connections,” but I guess I am just not quite convinced myself that there’s any direct influence from one to the other — although the impossibly jagged cliffs in Lehr’s cover for Zelazny’s Isle of the Dead (strange coincidence!) are tantalizingly similar, visually, to the trees in Böcklin’s “Isle of the Dead” variations. Or maybe I’m just seeing things!
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