She covers the whole country

What it is

This is a pencil and coloured-crayon drawing by Theodor Kittelsen, signed Th. Kittelsen 1904. It shows a hooded figure in a dark cloak with a pale, wide-eyed face. The figure holds a rake and walks down a grassy slope past turf-roofed wooden huts toward a fjord and snow-streaked mountains under a grey sky. The catalogue describes it as a Norwegian image of plague spreading over the land.

Why it matters

Kittelsen made this work in 1904, several centuries after the Black Death of 1346 to 1353. It is not a record of the pandemic but an artist's later image of it. It shows how the plague was remembered and imagined in Norway much later, using the setting of a rural landscape and a figure that suggests death.

Look closer

• What does the hooded figure seem to be doing, and how does the artist make it look threatening or lonely?
• Why might an artist in 1904 choose a rural Norwegian landscape to show the plague?
• What would a written account from the 1350s tell us that this drawing cannot?