Dance of Death: Death the Strangler (1850): Art, History and Details

Dance of Death: Death the Strangler (1850) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Alfred Rethel (German, 1816–1859).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Death the Strangler refers to an event of some twenty years earlier in Paris, as the caption explains: "The first outbreak of cholera at a masked ball in Paris in 1831." Rethel was influenced by 16th-century images of death, such as Hans Holbein's Dance of Death (on view in gallery 109). Here, the artist's interpretation of death as an overwhelmingly menacing force derives from Albrecht Dürer, whose Apocalypse: The Four Horsemen (also on view in gallery 109) depicts death as a destructive power sweeping away everything in its path.

Object facts

• Title: Dance of Death: Death the Strangler
• Date: 1850
• Creator attribution: Alfred Rethel (German, 1816–1859)
• Culture: Germany, 19th century
• Type: Print
• Technique: woodcut
• Dimensions: Image: 30.7 x 27.4 cm (12 1/16 x 10 13/16 in.); Sheet: 50.3 x 36.5 cm (19 13/16 x 14 3/8 in.)
• Collection: PR - Woodcut
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1939.620

Collection credit

Gift of Robert Hays Gries

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.