The Dance of Death: The Urchin Robbers

Rowlandson's aquatint shows Death as an animated skeleton pursuing terrified garden thieves across a manicured estate, while a portly gentleman gestures furiously from the left. The caption reads O the unconscionable Brute! To murder for a little Fruit! — pointing the satire at disproportionate punishment, or perhaps at Death's indifference to social rank. The working-class boy-thieves are rendered with the broad, rubbery exaggeration typical of Rowlandson: bulging eyes, flailing limbs, bodies caught mid-flight. Aquatint's soft tonal washes give the chase a theatrical energy that pure etching could not. This plate belongs to Rowlandson's Dance of Death series, a direct descendant of medieval danse macabre imagery filtered through Georgian print satire — sequential, narrative imagery sold cheaply in sheets, the direct ancestor of the comic strip.