The Danse Macabre Series

Paul Rumsey is an English draftsman and printmaker, born in Essex in 1956 and trained at Colchester School of Art and Chelsea School of Art in London. He is known for intricately worked drawings, mostly in charcoal, of dark, grotesque and fantastic subjects. His drawings on the theme of the danse macabre, the medieval Dance of Death, take one of the oldest images in European art and stage it as a scene of uneasy theater.

What you're looking at

The drawing shown here is a single, almost cinematic moment. In a pool of light at the center, a skeleton dances alone. It throws its arms wide, one leg kicked up and bent, its skull tipped back as if laughing or singing to the sky. The bones are drawn with real anatomical knowledge, the ribcage foreshortened and the spine twisting, yet the pose is pure exuberance.

On either side, a crowd of hooded and shawled figures presses in from the darkness. They are drawn with softer, smudged charcoal, their faces half lost in shadow, and they stand very still. Some clasp their hands; some seem to stare; none joins the dance. The floor in front of them is a pale, scraped expanse, and the light from above falls only on the dancer, leaving the onlookers at the edges of visibility. Rumsey's signature appears at the lower right.

That contrast between one frantic figure and a silent audience is the point. In the medieval tradition Death leads everyone into the dance; here the living watch, as if waiting their turn.

The tradition behind it

The danse macabre appeared in fifteenth-century Europe, after waves of plague, in murals and printed books showing skeletons or corpses leading people of every rank, pope, emperor, merchant, peasant, in a procession to the grave. Its message was equality in death. The best-known versions include the lost mural at the Cemetery of the Innocents in Paris (1424) and Hans Holbein the Younger's woodcuts of the 1520s. The theme returned in the Romantic and Symbolist eras, in music such as Saint-Saëns's Danse macabre and in prints by artists such as Alfred Kubin, whom Rumsey's gallery cites as an influence.

Rumsey's skeleton belongs to that line, but his crowd is not a hierarchy of social ranks. It is an anonymous congregation, which makes the image feel less like a sermon and more like a ritual.

Related works

See the overview in Danse Macabre and Memento Mori & Vanitas, and compare Hugo Simberg's The Garden of Death and Bruegel's The Triumph of Death.