5/24/2023 0 Comments Anarchy james tate![]() That said, the central image is relatively unambiguous and clearly depicts a cadaver wearing a crown, bent forwards over the back of a horse and falling towards the viewer. ![]() The overall impression is of an apparition, a phantasm, whose oneiric quality propels it out of everyday experience into another realm. The skeleton’s strangely undefined mount, a mere cipher of a horse, adds to the picture’s otherworldly and nightmarish effect. The archetypal figure of Death looms out of a dark background, its open arms spread wide as though to embrace the spectator. Without further contextual or narrative underpinnings that might explain it, the painting has the iconic concentration and visual punch of a memento mori. The painting’s unfinished state and its macabre subject have conspired to make it one of Turner’s most enigmatic and unsettling pictures. Yet this painting puts at centre stage not a living being, but a skeletal body. The prominence and scale of the central forms of the composition extends a tendency seen in other works of this period when Turner experimented with paintings where the figures are dominating presences. ![]() The style and execution of the painting suggest a date for its production from the later 1820s to the early 1830s. ![]() ![]() The Turner Bequest includes a number of paintings whose subjects remain obscure, one of them being an unfinished canvas that was formerly catalogued as A Skeleton Falling Off a Horse in Mid-Air, and is now tentatively titled Death on a Pale Horse(?) c.1825–30 (fig.1). ![]()
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