The Dance of Death: Time & Death, and Goody Barton

Rowlandson's aquatint stages the medieval danse macabre as low English comedy: a skeletal Death, grinning and angular, seizes a stout village woman outside a country alehouse while an emaciated Father Time drives a death-cart piled with corpses, his scythe raised over a panicking crowd. The printmaking technique — aquatint washed in watercolour tints — gives the carnage a deceptively cheerful palette. The peasant figures carry the broad class caricature standard to Georgian satire: red-faced, thick-limbed, ridiculous in their terror, their low station marking them as natural victims of mortality's farce. Rowlandson's sequential Dance of Death series (published by Ackermann) bridges the single satirical plate and the narrative comic strip, anticipating the page-by-page storytelling that would become the comic book.