Death: Paintings and Portraits

Artist and writer Sean Burns explores the nature of Death and its tangled relationships with life and love as depicted in art.

Death haunts art. It lurks in the shadows of Edward Collier’s Still Life as a reminder of our fragile mortality. It overcomes all in Francis Bacon’s Triptych and Anna Lea Merritt’s Love Locked Out.

From personal responses to general meditations on the fleeting transience of life, Sean Burns looks at the breadth of historical and contemporary works in Britain’s nat...