Death as a Strangler Tapestry

Artist's Description Alfred Rethel (May 15, 1816 – December 1, 1859) was a German history painter. This is a detail of Rethel’s much larger woodcut, but done in my style. The original image is an allegory of a cholera epidemic that struck Paris in 1831. The outbreak killed 20,000 of the city’s 650,000 inhabitants. After several years as a highly successful painter of major public commissions, Alfred Rethel’s intermittent bouts of mental illness led him to devote himself to the less-pressured activity of printmaking.