Focus on this artwork and explore the First version.
Originally titled The Triumph of Death, the first version was executed in 1783 and exhibited in the Royal Academy in 1784. West, inspired by Mortimer's Death on a Pale Horse, drafted a picture of the same subject. However, he took Mortimer's more personal and intimate view of the subject into an extravagant spectacle reminiscent of the art of the Rubens. The art historian Allen Staley describes this work as the beginning of West's departure from "earlier paintings of classical subjects celebrating virtuous and heroic human behavior." West was one of the several artists, including James Barry and Henry Fuseli, who in the 1770s turned away from Neoclassicism and began exploring the sublime. But West's biographer, John Galt, argued that West's new direction involved more than artistic fashion, and instead anticipates "the renewed piety of the 19th century."
James Barry John Galt Henry Fuseli the sublime