The Dance of Death: The Masquerade

A skeletal Death — robed, scythe raised, torch aloft — crashes a masquerade ball, sending costumed revelers sprawling across a circular pleasure-hall ringed by tiered galleries packed with onlookers. Rowlandson's aquatint, hand-coloured in the loose, warm washes his workshop perfected, uses the medieval danse macabre tradition as social commentary: the idle pleasure-seeking crowd — rendered with the bulbous noses, gaping mouths, and class-coded costumes typical of Georgian caricature — is cut down without distinction of rank or wealth. The image belongs to Rowlandson's collaboration with the publisher Ackermann on a full Dance of Death series, placing it squarely in the Gillray–Rowlandson lineage of sequential satirical prints whose page-by-page storytelling logic flows directly into the nineteenth-century comic strip.