La Pendaison (The Hanging)

Jacques Callot, artist

1592–1635

La Pendaison (The Hanging), 1633

Portfolio/Series title: Les Miseres et Les Mal-Heures de la Guerre

Where object was made: France

Material/technique: etching

Dimensions:
Plate Mark/Block Dimensions (Height x Width): 82 x 185 mm
Plate Mark/Block Dimensions (Height x Width): 3 1/4 x 7 5/16 in
Mat Dimensions (Height x Width): 19 x 14 in

Credit line: Museum purchase

Accession number: 1968.0019.11

Not on display

Add to portfolio

If you wish to reproduce this image, please submit an image request

Images

Label texts

Exhibition Label:
"Trees & Other Ramifications: Branches in Nature & Culture," Mar-2009, Steve Goddard
This etching from a series of eighteen prints concerning The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) offers an early view of a hanging tree. Although it uses a metaphor similar to that in “Strange Fruit,” a song about a lynching immortalized by jazz singer Billie Holiday, the first stanza of this print’s inscription clearly identifies the scene as one of justice, not of murder:
A la fin ces Voleurs infâmes et perdue,
Comme fruits malheureux a cet arbre pendue
(In the end these wretched and ruined plunderers Hang from this tree like ill-fated fruit)