Chilling Art: Five Unsettling Paintings About Death

How art can illuminate the darkness of dying

Life and Death (1910–15) by Gustav Klimt. Oil on canvas. Leopold Museum, Vienna. Source Wikimedia Commons

Paintings about death come in a fascinating variety of forms. Sometimes they are symbolic, drawing on long-established motifs — like islands, rivers, dark forests, skulls and skeletons — to get to the heart of our communal fears about death.

And sometimes they are literal depictions of a specific death, either a historical representation or an idealised description from a literary source.

Here I look at five works of art that each shines a unique light on the dark corners of death.

Life and Death (1910–15) by Gustav Klimt

This remarkable image by Gustav Klimt, completed in 1915, captures the opposition between life and death in all its obscure anxieties.

A series of sleeping figures are shown on the right-hand side, representing the aspiration common to all humankind, to live in peace and tranquillity. All generations are shown, from baby to grandmother. They are interlaced with each other, wrapped in colourful blankets, with their eyes closed, innocent in their dreaming.

Meanwhile, Death lurks nearby. Represented by a grinning skeleton who stands tall and wizened, bearing a club with which to strike down one of the sleeping figures. The decoration of his cloak, covered with crosses — along with two circular symbols which may represent the universal male and female — is a depiction of a burial ground within his very being.

The painting makes use of Klimt’s unique approach to composition by using a two-dimensional background to provide an abstract setting, and thereby universalising the allegory.

Isle of the Dead (1880) by Arnold Böcklin

Arnold Böcklin was a Swiss painter working in the second half of the 19th century. His most famous work was the Isle of the Dead, a striking painting that creates an overwhelming impression of silence and melancholic serenity.

It was clearly an important work for Böcklin since he actually produced five alternative versions. Shown here is the first of the series.

The painting depicts an isolated island seen across an expanse of inky dark water. Arriving at the isle is a rowing boat with an oarsman and a standing figure dressed from head to toe in white. Just ahead of the figure is a square object shrouded in a white sheet, undoubtedly a coffin, ready to be interred on the island.

The tiny island is dominated by a dense grove of tall, dark cypresses — trees long associated with cemeteries and mourning, since in classical antiquity the cypress was linked with death because it failed to regenerate when cut back too severely.

The symbol of a rowing boat transporting the dead to their final resting place also has a long history in myth: in Greek mythology, the souls of the dead were carried across the River Styx to the gates of Hades by the oarsman Charon.

Undoubtedly Böcklin drew on these traditions, yet his vision is entirely original — and singularly gripping too.

Ophelia (1851) by John Everett Millais

This painting, by the British artist John Everett Millais, shows a young woman lying on her back in a small river. Her name is Ophelia, a character in the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Ophelia is a young noblewoman who is driven to madness when her father, Polonius, is murdered by her lover, Prince Hamlet.

As Ophelia sinks into the river, she appears to be resigned to her fate. Her face is calm and impassive — in fact, she appears to be singing. One can feel the steady swirl of water passing over her middle. The water is slowly overtaking her embroidered dress, seeming to keep her afloat for a moment, whilst also pulling her downwards into the brook.

Ophelia’s watery demise occurs in Act IV of Hamlet. The scene is not shown on stage but is described by Queen Gertrude in poetic verse. Gertrude reports that Ophelia had climbed into a willow tree above a brook and that part of the branch broke — “Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke”— dropping Ophelia into the water.

The painting shows us the very moment when Ophelia has fallen from the broken tree branch. She begins to sing — “Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes”— and without struggle, sinks into the water.

It strikes me that the remarkable aspect of this painting is that the artist was able to give form to a piece of theatrical description. Ophelia’s death may not have appeared in the play, yet through this painting we are able to glimpse the event, made particular and unique by Millais’ artistic talents.

Grief (1898) by Oskar Zwintscher

Oskar Zwintscher was an important member of the Symbolist movement in eastern Germany. He made notable contributions to the Jugendstil (“Youth Style”) — the German counterpart of Art Nouveau.

This striking painting, titled simply Grief, shows a desolate man lamenting over the lifeless body of a woman. Both figures are naked, suggesting the primitive, all-pervasive nature of death and mourning.

To emphasise the melancholy, the man is being literally crushed beneath a great black rock that is being pushed downwards by the clawed hands of Death.

It is a striking work of art: simple, silent and tragic. I think one of the great successes of the work is that one can experience it before beginning to wonder what it’s trying to say.

The Death of Marat (1793) by Jacques-Louis David

In this dramatic painting — one of my personal favourites — a man lies collapsed in a bath, his head wrapped in a swathe of bandages, a knife wound in his chest. In one hand a letter, in the other a quill pen recently dipped in ink. In the bottom left corner, the bloodied implement of his murder…

The painting is based on a real-life murder, the political assassination of Jean-Paul Marat. Marat was a journalist and political radical during the French Revolution. He was a vocal defender of the lower classes and published his fervent views in pamphlets and newspapers. In his personal life, he suffered from a severe skin condition which he eased by taking regular medicinal baths.

On the night of the 13th July 1793, Charlotte Corday, politically opposed to Marat, entered his chambers with a 6-inch kitchen knife and stabbed him once in the chest whilst he lay in his bath. She was quickly arrested and executed by guillotine four days later.

In his Neoclassical style, Jacques-Louis David’s painting emerges as a precise combination of tenderness and lucidity: human pathos underpinned with geometrical composition. Few works of art achieve the same potency in such a pared-down, structured style.

The poet Baudelaire wrote of this memorable painting, “The drama is here, vivid in its pitiful horror. This painting is David’s masterpiece and one of the great curiosities of modern art because, by a strange feat, it has nothing trivial or vile … This work contains something both poignant and tender; a soul is flying in the cold air of this room, on these cold walls, around this cold funerary tub.”