Alfred Rethel

He showed an interest in art in his early life, and at the age of thirteen he executed a drawing which procured his admission to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

[2] At the age of twenty, Rethel moved to Frankfurt, and was selected to decorate the walls of the imperial hall in the Römer with Fresco paintings of figures of famous men.

The picture, so the story goes, was won in a lottery at Frankfurt by a personage of high rank, who had been guilty of an undiscovered crime, and the contemplation of his prize drove him mad.

[2] Another design which Rethel executed was "Death the Avenger," a skeleton appearing at a masked ball, scraping daintily, like a violinist, upon two human bones.

It is by such designs as these, executed in a technique founded upon that of Albrecht Dürer, and animated by an imagination akin to that of the elder master, that Rethel is most widely known.