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Hidden Halloween Treasures in the National Gallery’s Collection

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This Halloween, we’ve pulled out some of our spookiest artworks, from the ghoulish to the darkly funny to the outright bizarre.

Discover terrifying treasures from Hieronymous Bosch, William Blake, Edvard Munch, and Andy Warhol—plus lesser-known artists who brilliantly captured ghosts, witches, vampires, and monsters. These works are sure to send shivers down your spine.

  • Printed in black on cream-white paper, a person standing on a bridge holds both hands to their oval-shaped head in this stylized lithograph. The person’s waifish body creates an S-shape, and their hollow eyes look slightly off to the left. The face has exaggeratedly high cheekbones, and the mouth is open in a tall oval. The bridge stretches from the bottom right corner of the print to the middle of the left edge of the sheet. Two black silhouettes represent people at the far end of the bridge. A curving form in the distance suggests a body of water with a couple of masted ships near the coastline. The rest of the landscape is carved with woodgrain-like, closely spaced, organic lines, and waves surge across the sky. A printed inscription in the margin below the image reads “Geschrei” and a pencil inscription in the lower right corner reads, “Edw Munch No 21.”
  • A nude, muscular man with pale mauve-pink skin and seven human heads straddles a blue-skinned creature with seven beast-like heads in this vertical ink and watercolor illustration. The body of the Great Red Dragon, the creature with mauve skin, and his outstretched, webbed wings nearly fill the composition. The wings are spotted with silver, five-pointed stars. Rams’ horns scroll from his central head and some of the smaller heads to each side. Two of the outer heads have horns like unicorns but the faces are obscured by others in front. He stands with knees slightly bent and feet widely planted on choppy waters. His arms are thrust straight by his sides so the palms face down and the fingers flare outward. Fins jut out from next to his right knee and ankle, to our left. The second creature, the Beast from the Sea, is between the Great Red Dragon’s legs, sunk up to the chest in the white-crested water. The Beast looks up at the Great Red Dragon with all seven, equally sized heads. These heads also have straight or curling horns but exaggerated, thick lips and feline-like noses. The Beast raises both arms so one is in front of one of the Great Red Dragon’s legs and the other is behind. The Beast holds up a flaming sword with the right hand, to our left, and a flaming object, perhaps a scepter or torch, in the other hand. The background behind the pair is inky black. The artist signed the lower right, “WB inv.”
  • Painted entirely in shades of white, charcoal, and steel gray, a slim, white, almost ghostly dog makes its way from our left to right with its snout held low, along a sidewalk or rails in this vertical composition. The dog is thinly painted and blurry, as if shown in action, so the details are difficult to make out. The dark, gray space is defined only by three diagonals running from the center of the left edge down into the lower right corner. Within the band made by the lower two diagonals, two parallel sets of curving, parallel lines suggest grates or gutters over storm drains. Seeming unrelated to the rest of the image, three faint, gray, ruled lines radiate upward from a point near the lower-left corner to intersect the lowermost border defining the gutter.
  • A naked man with ghostly white skin sits upright in a canopied bed set in a narrow room in this tall, vertical painting. Wearing a black cap, he looks to our left in profile toward a skeleton who comes through a door along the left edge of the composition. The man gestures at the skeleton with one hand and, with the other, toward a bag of money held up by a small demon next to the bed to our left. The skeleton wears a white shroud and holds an arrow. A winged angel kneels next to the man in the bed, one hand on the man’s shoulder and the other lifted to gesture at a crucifix hanging in the window over the door. A small devil on the canopy above looks down onto the bed. At the foot of the bed, a man wearing a green robe and headdress drops coins into a sack held by another demon. Three more demons crawl about and hide under the chest. Pieces of armor and weapons lie on the ground to the right in front of a stone ledge in the foreground. Two pieces of clothing drape over the ledge to our left.

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