Book of Hours

Prior to his collaboration with Lützelburger on the prints for Images of Death, Holbein traveled to France, hoping to find employment at the royal court. In Tours, Holbein encountered a workshop of manuscript illuminators, whose illustrations for Books of Hours provided inspiration for at least two death scenes. Holbein converted the workshop’s illustrations of the month of October, featuring a laborer plowing a field (shown in this later manuscript), into Death and the Plowman (or Peasant) for the printed series. In Holbein’s reinterpretation, a rather pastoral scene of agrarian life takes a sinister turn as Death whips the horses onward: the plowman’s toil leads to his demise.