The Dance of Death: The Pantomime

Rowlandson's aquatint stages the medieval danse macabre inside the anarchic world of Harlequinade pantomime. A leering skeleton — Death personified — clutches an hourglass and sidles up to Pierrot, the white-costumed clown, whose face registers comic-horrified recognition. Behind them, a bloated Pantaloon figure cowers; to the right, Harlequin and Columbine cavort obliviously on horseback while a ship waits in the distance. The caption reads: Behold the signal of Old Time / That bids you close your Pantomime. Rowlandson's aquatint line is fluid, loose, distinctly anti-academic. This print sits squarely in the Gillray–Rowlandson tradition of sequential comic imagery whose visual rhythm — repeated figure-types, physical exaggeration, narrative read left to right — fed directly into the comic strip.