What better way to celebrate fright night in print than with a danse macabre? This eerie etching is by Scottish painter-printmaker William Strang (1859 – 1921) and shows a group of cloaked skeletons on stilts. It builds on a long tradition of works of art entitled ‘The Dance of Death’, popular since the late Medieval period. The best-known is Hans Holbein’s series of 41 woodcuts, first published in 1538, which show the figure of Death tormenting every corner of society from beggars to empresses, judges to thieves, and bishops to newlyweds. In Strang’s interpretation, there is no specific victim, perhaps casting a more chilling effect as who knows where this ghoulish throng are headed on Halloween night…
For more deathly designs, mesmerising mezzotints, funereal photographs, and petrifying paintings, please visit us in the Prints and Drawings Study Room.
