NEW YORK, NY.- Bonhams presents Dance of Death, a curated selection of macabre masterpieces from the collection of the late Richard Harris. The sale will take place from October 21 – November 1 and will feature an extraordinary group of over 115 works focused on the iconography of death.

After retiring in 2001 from his business as an antique prints dealer in Chicago, Harris began to amass a distinctly unusual group of works which he called the “Visual Gateway to the Conversation about Death.” The outstanding selection features works in a range of mediums from vernacular photography and ephemera to masterpieces of sculpture, drawing, print and painting. The collection stems from what Harris called his “unquenchable curiosity to investigate the visual subject of Death” and it highlights our everlasting quest to make peace with this universal, inevitable part of life.

Two highlights of the sale are striking paintings by celebrated Flemish artists from the 17th century. Allegory for War by Jan Brueghel the Younger (1601-1878), a dramatic battleground scene featuring where Death is depicted through fighting animals and gods and symbols of ill luck, is estimated at $30,000 – 50,000. Vanitas still life with a bouquet and a skull, c.1642 by Adriaen van Utrecht (1599-1652), estimated at $20,000 – 30,000, includes a human skull, gold coins, flowers, and books in a haunting still-life. Pavel Tchelitchew’s (1898-1957) work The Living Shell (1944) is another highlight of the sale, estimated at $25,000 – 35,000, and inspects the human form through a diagrammatic depiction of the human head, neck, and spine. Jim Dine’s (b. 1935) The Face in the Rage of Red (1986), estimated at $20,000 – 30,000, approaches representations of death through the lens of Pop Art. In the work, the prolific American artist paints a skull, a widely used icon throughout his oeuvre, surrounded by abstracted swathes of color.

The collection also features a number of photographs by eminent photographers such as Robert Mapplethorpe (1948-1989) and Irving Penn (1917-2009). Mapplethorpe’s Skull Walking Cane, estimated at $10,000 – 15,000, and Penn’s Ospedale, estimated at $10,000 – 15,000, feature macabre props in their eerie photographs. A sculptural highlight from the sale is a Carved Boxwood Memento Mori Figure (17th/18th century) in the manner of Hans Leinberger (active 1511-1530), estimated at $15,000 – 25,000, which features a standing skeleton, partially flayed. A Carved Limewood Figure of Kronos, attributed to Johann Wolfgang von der Auwera (1708-1756) and estimated at $10,000 – 14,000, depicts the winged figure of time standing with a scythe.

Additional highlights of the sale include:

• The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, from The Apocalypse by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), estimated at $20,000 – $30,000.

• An Allegory of the Bible from the German School (16th century), estimated at $18,000 – $25,000.

• Nuke News, 1983 by Robert Arneson (1930-1992), estimated at $15,000 – $25,000.

• A print by Odilon Redon (1840-1916), titled L’Ange et La Mort, estimated at $15,000 – $20,000.

• A print by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), titled La Chronique Medicale, estimated at $12,000 – $18,000, a study initially rejected for being too macabre for a commissioning medical journal.