[1] The painting depicts Corinth and the skeleton as the two protagonists: they are near each other, with the panorama of the city of Munich in the background, seen through the wide studio window.

According to Charlotte Berend-Corinth's catalog raisonné, the canvas depicts “Corinth in front of a large studio window, in a pale blue checked shirt.

Böcklin depicted the skeleton in his work as a live figure, he plays the violin while the artist listens to it.

He wanted to illustrate the fact that life is finite, similarly to a Memento mori, and at the same time, death served as his muse.

Here a skull decorated with a laurel wreath looks over the artist's shoulder and above his head, in the branches of a tree, sits the god Cupid.

He presents a skeleton, as was normally used back then as a teaching model for anatomical demonstrations in medicine, lifeless and in the form of an object that had been stripped of all threat and symbolic power.

The connection to reality is reinforced by the real depiction of a big city with smoking chimneys that enters through the window into the brightly lit room.

This time, there isn't a studio window visible, but instead, as a darker metaphore, a goat skull in the form of a trophy that hangs on the wall at the background.

In his later graphics and drawings, created after the German defeat at World War I, in 1918, death in the form of a skull appears very often.