The Dance of Death: The Dram Shop

Rowlandson's aquatint drops Death — rendered as a grinning skeleton perched among barrels — into a crowded London gin-shop. At centre, flushed women in empire-waist gowns are steered toward the counter by a hunched male figure; at their feet, insensible drunks sprawl in postures of degradation. The working-class patrons are drawn with the broad, rubbery distortion Rowlandson perfected: loose lips, rolling eyes, thickened bodies. This carries the era's class contempt plainly — the poor are shown as their own executioners, Death merely presiding. The aquatint's soft tonal washes, hand-coloured after printing, descend directly from Hogarth's Gin Lane (1751). Rowlandson's sequential Dance of Death series anticipates the page-by-page narrative logic that would migrate, via illustrated weeklies and Bilderbogen sheets, into the modern comic book.