The Plague by Arnold Bocklin Business Card

The Plague (1898). Artist: Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901). The Plague is a vintage Victorian Era Symbolism fine art macabre painting that exemplifies the artist's obsession with nightmares of war, pestilence and death. The painting shows a scene from the black plague in which Death rides facing backwards on a winged, fish-tailed flying creature, who travels at high speed through the street of a mediaeval town. Death holds a scythe, which he uses to cut down all those who lay in his path. Foreboding clouds of dark smoke rising in the far background (the direction in which Death is headed), indicating that the scene is likely part of a greater apocalypse that has befallen mankind. About the artist: Arnold Böcklin was a painter specialising in Symbolism and influenced by Romanticism. His paintings are symbolist with mythological subjects often overlapping with the Pre-Raphaelites. They often portray mythological, fantasy figures along classical architecture constructions (revealing often an obsession with death) and creating a strange, fantasy world.