The Old Man and Death

[1] Because this was one of the comparatively rare fables featuring humans, it was the subject of many paintings, especially in France, where Jean de la Fontaine's adaptation had made it popular.

The standard version as it now exists is that of Roger L'Estrange's retelling: 'An old man that had travelled a great way under a huge Burden of Sticks found himself so weary that he cast it down, and called upon Death to deliver him from a more miserable Life.

[4] A French version also appeared at this time in Bernard Salomon's Les Fables d'Esope Phrygien, mises en Ryme Francoise (Lyons 1544).

La Mort et le malheureux (Death and man in misfortune, I.15) is a rewriting of the story in which the main emphasis is placed on the moral to be drawn from the situation.

A notable exception was Gustave Doré's, depicting the laden woodman leaning against a rock, in which the spectral figure of Death with his scythe is merely an outline down a forest aisle.

[12] Among the French Romantic artists who used La Fontaine's fable as the inspiration for dramatic landscapes, Louis Boulanger exhibited his painting in 1833,[13] Gabriel Bouret[14] and Eugène-Ferdinand Buttura[15] theirs in 1837.

At that time, too, Baron Félix-Sébastien Feuillet de Conches commissioned a Chinese painting of this fable and others for a special edition illustrated by artists from around the world that was published about 1840.