The Dance of Death: The Good and Great

Thomas Rowlandson's coloured aquatint depicts a funeral cortège passing through an arched gateway while a crowd of mourners — working-class women, children, clergymen, and gentlemen — press forward in exaggerated grief. A skeletal Death figure drives or accompanies the hearse, Rowlandson's signature device from his Dance of Death series. The aquatint medium, with its warm hand-applied colour washes, gives the scene theatrical warmth that undercuts its solemn subject. Class caricature runs throughout: the poor are rendered with bulbous noses and hunched postures typical of Georgian comic convention, marking social station through physiognomy in ways the era accepted without apology. Rowlandson sits at the direct headwaters of the comic-strip tradition — his sequential narrative prints, grotesque figures, and speech-driven comedy supplied the visual grammar that Töpffer, then Outcault, then the comic-book artists would codify into a medium.