The death of the year

A dying woman fades into streams of white in Charles Sims’ haunting symbolist painting <em>The death of the year</em>. But a baby emerges from the darkness – a new year beginning as the old one ends.

Sims was a respected portrait and landscape painter, whose style became increasingly mystical as his mental health declined after the traumas of World War I. He made <em>The death of the year</em> before the war, yet it anticipates the strangeness and emotional intensity of his later works.

Like <em>Goblin market</em>, the painting was brought here as part of the Baillie exhibition of British art in 1912, and was purchased through charitable donations from the public.