#death

This was originally the side panel of a bigger triptych — the centre piece is long gone, so nobody's totally sure what completed the scene.

This was, from what I've read, his third try at a big Paris student prize, and he lost again — to a rival painting the exact same death scene, only plainer and darker. The judges apparently wanted fewer people waving their arms about.

The Latin cut into the tomb is death talking — roughly 'I'm here too', even in a perfect countryside that never existed anywhere. He'd apparently painted the same idea years earlier in a much bleaker version, and this one is the calm rethink.

The story is out of Plato: Socrates convicted of corrupting the young, handed poison, and choosing to keep talking rather than run. It turned up a couple of years before the Revolution, and people at the time apparently read a man refusing to shut up for the state as being about a lot more than Athens.

Supposedly death coming for everyone regardless of rank was a stock subject back then — a 'dance of death' you'd see on church walls and in cheap prints — and this drags it out of the church and into open country. It went through a long restoration not many years ago, which is apparently why the colours come across as strong as they do now.

The death in it happened when he was a boy — his sister — but he didn't paint it until decades later, and from what I can find that's why the family in the room are all the age they were when he picked up the brush, not the age they were at the time.