Art, literature & history
Dance of Death: Death the Strangler
1850
- Dating
- Exact year
- Held at
- The Cleveland Museum of Art
- Medium
- 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 no.
- 1939.620
- Attribution
- By the artist
- Image rights
- CC0 1.0License details
Alfred Rethel. Dance of Death: Death the Strangler. Alfred Rethel; The Cleveland Museum of Art; Gift of Robert Hays Gries. CC0 1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/). Full-frame proportional resize and JPEG compression.
Collection: The Cleveland Museum of Art
About this artwork
Dance of Death: Death the Strangler — Alfred Rethel. 1850.
Medium: 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 record: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland. Museum connection according to this source; current display unverified.
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.
Source: official collection record. Metadata selected and normalized by Artline from the source export, accessed 10 September 2026; no museum endorsement. Reproduction rights are separate.
Location checked Sep 10, 2026. This does not indicate whether the work is on display.