Smoking Skeleton (The Cook and Friends) 

William Balthazar Rose's oil painting presents a tableau vivant where death, personified by a smoking skeleton, holds court amidst an assembly of figures. The skeleton, clad in red, immediately evokes the medieval "Danse Macabre," where death is an active participant in life, not just an end. Here, it sits, a judge perhaps, puffing on a pipe, a symbol of fleeting pleasure. This motif echoes across centuries, reappearing in Northern Renaissance art as a ‘memento mori’ skull, a reminder of mortality. The horse-headed figure, a less conventional symbol, could be interpreted through the lens of ancient carnival traditions, where animal masks blur the lines between human and beast, order and chaos. This potent imagery engages us on a deeply subconscious level. Notice how the artist compels us to recognize how the same symbols resurface, evolving and accumulating new layers of meaning as they traverse through time.