De dans van de dood (The Dance of Death)

A skeletal Death, rendered with Rowlandson's characteristic loose, fluid line, seizes a well-dressed gentleman by the shoulder while a catchpole—a debt-arresting officer—grabs the man from the other side. Two alarmed women recoil at left; a stooped figure and small dog occupy the right. The caption reads: The Catchpole need not fear a jail, / The Undertaker is his Bail. The target is debt and mortality as twin enforcers against the middling classes. Hand-colored aquatint etching gave Rowlandson's work its warm, theatrical immediacy. His serial Dance of Death plates—narrative, sequential, one moral joke per image—sit directly in the lineage running from Hogarth's story-sequences through the French canard broadsides to the numbered comic strip panel itself.