The Dance of Death: The Undertaker and the Quack

A corpulent physician rides a grey horse through a crowded town square, Death itself perched behind him as a grinning skeleton — the quack's silent business partner. Terrified townspeople scatter; a woman clutches a child; two elderly figures huddle in a doorway. The aquatint's warm hand-colouring sharpens the grotesque contrast between the doctor's self-satisfied bulk and his bony companion. Rowlandson works within a print-satire tradition stretching from Hogarth's The Company of Undertakers (1736) through Gillray's political grotesques: sequential, narrative, morally pointed imagery aimed at a broad buying public. These coloured satirical prints — sold singly from London shops — are a direct ancestor of the comic strip, establishing the page conventions of sequential figures, expressive exaggeration, and visual punchline that later passed into newspaper strips and comic books.