The British Museum's Quest for Variety

Olenka Horbatsch is Curator: Dutch and Flemish Collection

Max Klinger Death as Saviour
Max Klinger’s famously bizarre suites of prints on love and death produced during the 1880s are a highpoint of nineteenth-century symbolism. His portfolios rarely survive intact, and so were delighted to acquire two important examples, On Death I and On Love, in conjunction with recent exhibitions on Edvard Munch and Käthe Kollwitz at the British Museum. On Death I explores the transient nature of life and the omnipresence of death through various disasters, including shipwrecks, lightning, poverty, violence, greed, and negligence, as well as more ethereal fatalities. The series is akin to a modern-day ‘Todentanz’ or Death of Death, a traditional subject in German art popularised by Hans Holbein’s woodcuts in the sixteenth century. The corpse depicted along the lower edge of Klinger’s print, Death as Saviour, is also inspired by Holbein, and is depicted in the style of his famous painting of the Dead Christ.

Master HG Broadside on the Martyrdom of English Carthusian Monks
This engraved broadsheet shows a continental European view of a gruesome chapter of English history: the martyrdom of 18 Carthusian monks in England who were executed between 1535 and 1540, by order of Henry VIII for refusing to accept him as the head of the Church. The print shows six scenes ranging from the arrest of the monks by soldiers to the various suffering and torture, and the hanging, removal and dismemberment of the bodies. This print was intended as Catholic propaganda to incriminate the recently deceased Henry VIII and the violence associated with his conversion to Protestantism. The letterpress Latin in the lower half asks the Catholic reader to pray for the souls of the monks. Broadsheets or early newsprints were printed in large numbers, but rarely survive because of their temporary nature: this is the only known impression.

Lorenz Stör Overgrown Architectural Ruins with Mountain Landscape in Background, Birds overhead
The British Museum holds a representative collection of colour printmaking from the earliest examples in the fifteenth century to the present day, and we were thrilled to add this unique print, purchased at the 2017 London Original Print Fair from Christopher Mendez. This architectural woodcut made by the sixteenth-century Augsburg artist and designer, Lorenz Stör, was printed from two blocks in different shades of green. The contrasting colours were significant for the function of this print: it was intended as a model for cabinetmakers working with inlaid wood, and such prints could even have been pasted directly onto walls or furniture as imitation inlay, which is precisely why they rarely survive. Stör’s designs feature geometric shapes and ruins in overgrown and uninhabited landscapes, which are imbued with an eerie, almost surreal atmosphere.