The Cleveland Museum of Art

Collection Online as of December 19, 2025

Print in black ink shaded with even, hatched lines with a central, cloaked skeletal figure holding two bones as if playing a violin while three people in masked ball costumes lie on the floor around them. From a platform behind the skeletal figure, figures with instruments flee through a door on the left, glancing behind them with open mouths. Further in the background, another rush of people flees to the right.

Dance of Death: Death the Strangler

1850

Alfred Rethel

(German, 1816–1859)
Germany, 19th century
woodcut
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.)
Gift of Robert Hays Gries 1939.620
Catalogue raisonné: Beraldi XI.190
Location: Not on view

Description

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.
  • Against the Grain: Woodcuts from the Collection. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (August 17-November 9, 2003).
    Eastward from the Rhine: Romanticism to Abstraction, 1800-1925. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (June 12-September 9, 1984).
  • {{cite web|title=Dance of Death: Death the Strangler|url=false|author=Alfred Rethel|year=1850|access-date=19 December 2025|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}

Source URL:

https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1939.620