The Dance of Death: Death and the Portrait

A corpulent, white-wigged painter dozes in his studio armchair while a grinning skeleton — Death — seizes the brushes and palette to finish the portrait on the easel, rendering the artist's own likeness. To the left, a young couple flirts over drawings, oblivious. The walls are hung edge-to-edge with figure studies; casts and props litter the floor. Rowlandson's aquatint — acid-bitten line softened by hand-applied watercolour wash — captures the mordant comedy: art cannot outrun mortality; even the act of self-portraiture is commandeered by the grave. Part of Rowlandson's English Dance of Death series (1814–16), it extends the medieval danse macabre through Hogarthian social observation into sequential narrative satire — the direct ancestor of the comic strip's panel-by-panel storytelling and recurring cast.