The Charmed Island

The world of theatre was a rich source of inspiration for Oskar Laske, and even without the inscription on the back of the painting, the detailed story told by Oskar Laske leads us to conclude that William Shakespeare's play The Tempest served as inspiration for this work.
The play, which premiered in 1611, tells the story of the wizard Prospero and his daughter Miranda. While still Duke of Milan, Prospero immersed himself in the study of magic and neglected his duties as ruler. His brother Antonio took advantage of this opportunity and deposed him, whereupon Prospero fled with his daughter to a desert island. Twelve years later, the magician is ruler of the island and has subjugated the air spirit Ariel and Caliban, the son of the witch Sycorax and former lord of the island. It so happens that those responsible for Prospero's exile are sailing past the island in a ship. Prospero seizes this opportunity and, with Ariel's help, conjures up a storm that capsizes the ship, forcing the crew to take refuge on the island, where they are now at the mercy of the magician's vengeance.
Oskar Laske paints decisive scenes from the play from a bird's eye view. Laske took up the fairy-tale elements of the text in particular and transposed them into his own unique visual language. The composition, created as Opus 114, "shows imaginative hill formations projected onto the surface of an island, on which the individual scenes are played out in simultaneous representation. The events are depicted in a childlike, naive narrative form, with the figures, especially in the banquet scene at the bottom left, displaying clear traits of the Commedia dell'arte in their exaggerated gestures. The bright, luminous colours correspond to the fairy-tale character of this composition. [...] He was particularly interested in the fantastical hybrid creatures, the air spirit Ariel and the ape-like monster Caliban." 1
1 Cornelia Reiter in: Oskar Laske, Kunsthaus Wien February – May 1996, ed. Tobias Natter, p. 20