The Dance of Death: The Wedding

Rowlandson's aquatint shows a crowded church interior mid-ceremony: a skeletal Death, robed and presiding from the pulpit, blesses a mismatched bridal party below. The groom is corpulent and aging; the bride conspicuously young and fashionably dressed in Empire-waist white. Surrounding figures — rendered with the broad, rubbery physiognomy Rowlandson used to signal low breeding and moral vacancy — gape upward in comic oblivion. The class comedy is deliberate and unsparing: wealthy vulgarity purchasing youth, Death officiating as silent equalizer. Aquatint's soft tonal washes gave Rowlandson's line its characteristic warmth, distinguishing his work from Gillray's harsher etched bite. This Dance of Death series sits at the direct genealogical root of sequential comic art — recurring characters, narrative across plates, visual satire as popular print commodity.