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Edward Edwards in his Anecdotes of Painters (1808) observed that "the favorite subjects of Mr. Mortimer's pencil, were the representations of Bandatti, or those transactions recorded in history, wherein the exertion of soldiers are principally employed, as also, incantations, the frolics of monsters, and all those kind of scenes, that personify 'Horrible Imaginings.'" One of those "Horrible Imaginings" is the elaborate drawing of Death on a Pale Horse, which Mortimer exhibited at the Society of Arts in 1775 together with a companion drawing illustrating the line from I Corinthians, 15:55 "O Death! Where is thy sting? O Grave! Where is thy victory?" After Mortimer's death, both drawings were etched by Joseph Haynes and published by Mortimer's widow Jane on January I, 1784.
Mortimer's Subject is the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelations, his imagery drawn from the famous Dürer print of the four horsemen and seventeenth-century by Stefano della Bella. A related working drawing owned by the connoisseur and critic Richard Payne Knight is in the British Museum.
If Mortimer's predilection for "Horrible Imaginings" suggests an excessive and morbid temperament, Edward's confirms that the artist was "imprudent in his conduct, and intemperate in his pleasures, by which he injured his health." Yet his taste in subject matter went beyond such personal quirkiness or pathology. His macabre and sensationalistic imagery was shared by Henry Fuseli, and Mortimer's Death on a Pale Horse is but an early instance of an apocalyptic strain in later eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century art. The subject of the Fourth Horseman was subsequently taken up by James Gilray, William Blake, and Benjamin West.

Scott Wilcox

Scott Wilcox, Line of beauty : British drawings and watercolors of the eighteenth century, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 2001, p. 45, no. 33