Rodolphe Bresdin
(France 1822–1885)
- Title
- The comedy of death
- Alternative title:
- La comédie de la Mort
- Year
- 1854
- Media category
- Materials used
- lithograph
- Edition
- iv of 6 states
- Dimensions
-
34.5 x 25.3cm sheet
- Signature & date
- Signed l.r., [inscribed on stone] "Rudlphe Bresdin...". Not dated.
- Credit
- Purchased 1990
- Accession number
- 212.1990
- Location
- Not on display
- Further information
In his decadent novel ‘À Rebours’ (Against Nature) J.K. Huysmans describes this print, an impression of which hangs on the wall of the anti-hero’s apartment: ‘In an unlikely-looking landscape, bristling with trees, coppices and clumps of vegetation, all taking on the forms of demons and phantoms, and covered with birds with the heads of rats…some willows rise, surmounted by skeletons who are waving a bouquet with their arms in the air, while Christ flees away through a dappled sky, and a hermit with his head in his hands meditates in the depths of a grotto, and an unfortunate lies dying, worn out by privations, with his feet before a pond.’
- Bibliography (2)
-
'Diverse, individual and imaginative' by Peter Raissis, pg.24-27, Look Jul 2009, Jul 2009, 27 (illus.).
Renée Free (Australia) (Author), Forest and field: from Claude to the Barbizon School, Domain, 1995, 8.
- Exhibition history (2)
-
Forest and field: from Claude to the Barbizon School, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 14 Jul 1995–17 Sep 1995.
Printmaking in the age of Romanticism, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 06 Aug 2009–25 Oct 2009.
