The Dance of Death: The Prisoner Discharged

Rowlandson's aquatint — etched outline flooded with watercolour wash, his signature method — shows Death as an animated skeleton escorting a dishevelled young man out of a debtors' prison doorway. Creditors and jailers recoil on the steps while, in the right distance, a woman raises her arms in relief. The caption beneath reads that Death alone, requiring neither bribe nor fee, can free the hopeless prisoner: a pointed comment on a legal system that imprisoned the poor indefinitely for debt while the wealthy bought their way out. Rowlandson's Dance of Death series (published with William Combe) belongs to a centuries-old danse macabre tradition, here sharpened into social satire. His sequential narrative plates are a direct ancestor of the modern comic strip's panel-by-panel storytelling.