The comedy of death

In his decadent novel ‘À Rebours’ (Against Nature) J.K. Huysmans describes this print, an impression of which hangs on the wall of the anti-hero’s apartment: ‘In an unlikely-looking landscape, bristling with trees, coppices and clumps of vegetation, all taking on the forms of demons and phantoms, and covered with birds with the heads of rats…some willows rise, surmounted by skeletons who are waving a bouquet with their arms in the air, while Christ flees away through a dappled sky, and a hermit with his head in his hands meditates in the depths of a grotto, and an unfortunate lies dying, worn out by privations, with his feet before a pond.’