The Dance of Death: The Genealogist

A skeleton — Death personified — unrolls a sprawling genealogical chart before a stout, overdressed couple who squint at their family tree with absurd self-satisfaction, while a servant couple flirts unnoticed in the background. Rowlandson's aquatint technique, with its fluid etched line flooded by watercolour wash, was his signature tool for puncturing English social pretension. The joke is pointed: the aristocratic obsession with lineage is literally the work of Death, who keeps the books. The corpulent figures carry the class caricature typical of Rowlandson's era — bloated bodies signalling moral and intellectual vacancy. This plate belongs to his English Dance of Death series, which extended the medieval danse macabre tradition into Regency social comedy, and sits squarely in the lineage of sequential satirical print series — Hogarth's Rake's Progress, Gillray's political broadsides — from which the modern comic strip directly descends.