The Dance of Death: The Vision of Skulls

A leering skeleton — torch aloft, ribs gleaming — herds a crowd of Georgian Londoners through a catacomb whose walls are stacked floor to vault with skulls and bones. Rowlandson renders his victims as social types rather than individuals: the stout matron in yellow and white, the ruddy gentleman in scarlet, the dandy in his beaver hat — their fleshy bulk contrasted with Death's anatomy to sardonic effect. The class comedy is broad but not cruel; the corpulent figures reflect Rowlandson's habitual mockery of bourgeois self-importance rather than ethnic animus. The aquatint's warm hand-colouring softens outlines the etched plate bites sharp, a technical marriage Rowlandson perfected across his Dance of Death series. That rhythm of sequential figures moving through a single frame — panic transmitted body to body — is precisely the visual grammar the comic strip would later inherit.