The Four Horsemen, from The Apocalypse (1498)
by Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471–1528)
They are coming. All four of them, at once, from the right side of the image, bearing down on a crowd of people who have nowhere to go. An angel watches from above. Below the horses' hooves, the bodies are already piling up.
Albrecht Dürer was the greatest printmaker of the Northern Renaissance — a German artist who combined the technical precision of the goldsmith's tradition in which he trained with an imagination of extraordinary scope. In 1498, at the age of twenty-seven, he published The Apocalypse: a series of fifteen large-format woodcuts illustrating the Book of Revelation. It was the first book in history to be both written and illustrated by the same artist, and it made Dürer famous across Europe almost overnight.
The Four Horsemen is the series' most iconic image. Dürer renders the riders — Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death — not as distant symbols but as an immediate physical force: robes and clouds whipped by the speed of their approach, horses overlapping in a crush of momentum, the figures beneath them trampled without ceremony. The composition has no center of calm. Everything is motion, weight, and inevitability.
The finest impressions of the print were made without the accompanying text — the image alone, which is how it appears here.
Rectangle Canvas Wrap
Gallery-quality canvas with fade-resistant inks and a 1.25" deep pine frame sourced from renewable forests. Arrives wrapped and ready to hang.
- Materials: cotton and polyester composite canvas, pine wood frame
- Inner frame: radiata pine from renewable forests
- Leveling bumpers included for wall protection
- Ready to hang — mounting hardware pre-attached
Care: Dust gently with a clean, damp cloth as needed.