An office invented by usage

The angel of death has no place in the nine orders. No canonical text ranks him, and the tradition that produced Michael's armour and Gabriel's lily never issued him an attribute. He is an office assembled by usage — a personification of an event, given wings because wings were the available vocabulary. Two of the 224 titles in this catalogue name death directly, and this is one.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1890 and gives Gustave Moreau, a French painter, with Symbolism as the style term. No dimensions are recorded. The measured colour family is brown. The location on record is Musée National Gustave Moreau, Paris, France.

A tag from another catalogue

The record files this entry under Symbolism, and its subject tags include Animal Art and, specifically, Horse. That is a cross-listing from the shared catalogue rather than a claim about iconography, and it is worth reporting because it shows the entry sitting in two collections at once. The recorded location is the painter's own house museum in Paris. No dimensions are on file.