The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse business illustration as seen on HBO Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Originally commissioned as a commercial property comment for Estates Gazette Magazine, in a slightly different style, more traditional and painterly.
Here the bringers of doom are depicted as alienation, term, deposit and delapidation as the downside to renting. With the huge expansion of people investing in buying to let it is important that the needs of tenants are looked after and that landlords do not just see them as a cash cow from whom they simply collect a monthly rent without having to maintain a certain level of minimum standards of care and upkeep of their properties. Especially now that rents are so high and that people invest such a large percentage of their income to paying this particular bill.
The origins of the image of the harbingers of doom is the final books of the New Testament of the of Revelation of St John the Divine. In this The chapter tells of The Lamb of God, opening the first four of seven seals, which brings forth the riders on white, red, black, and pale horses. The riders are seen as symbolising conquest, war, famine, war and death. They are then said to create the apocalypse upon the world as harbingers of the Last Judgment.