Depictions of Death -(Page 2 of 4)

Artists have sought to capture the moment of death and dying for many different reasons. The sudden and violent death of a king such as Louis XVI depicted on the Plate with a scene depicting the execution of Louis XVI was an extraordinary historical moment that many people wished to see.

The date became one, like Independence Day in the United States, which was commemorated by the new Republic. If you look closely at the words at the bottom of the plate you can see the title is 'execution de Louis Capet'. Capet was the surname given to him by the new French republican government to make the point that he was now an ordinary citizen.

Before photographs and television a picture was the only way people could really see what had happened. Likewise, in Population Explosion the artist was moved by hearing on the news about the death of a mother's babies to create a piece of art representing the death scene in the hospital.

In The Dead Soldier the scene depicted in which a young widow with a newborn baby grieves over her dead husband is fictional, but the artist has used the emotional impact of such a scene to make a humanitarian plea for better treatment of soldiers' widows. The power of images of death to move us was used when images of Ethiopians dying from famine were shown on BBC television in 1984. This sparked an international outcry and response, most famously with the Band-Aid record and Live Aid concerts.