The Dance of Death: The Horse Race

Rowlandson's aquatint drops Death himself — skeletal, feathered hat flying — into a Regency racecourse, riding hard against a blue-coated gentleman jockey on a white horse. The crowd pressing the rail is rendered with Rowlandson's characteristic comic economy: working-class spectators in the foreground are broad, lumpen figures, their coarseness a deliberate class contrast to the mounted gentry. The caption below clinches the joke. Aquatint, with its soft tonal washes, was the ideal vehicle for coloured popular prints in this period. Rowlandson's Dance of Death series — adapting the medieval danse macabre into comic vignettes — sits squarely in the English graphic satire tradition running from Hogarth through Gillray, a lineage of sequenced, captioned pictorial narrative that feeds directly into the modern comic strip.