The Dance of Death: The Honeymoon

Rowlandson's aquatint shows an elderly, nightcapped husband slumped on a sofa beside his young, yellow-gowned wife, who flirts toward a window where a military officer peers in. A skeleton — Death personified — leans gleefully from the shadows above a table of medicines, reaching toward the old man's hourglass. A dog sleeps obliviously at their feet. The target is a stock satirical figure: the foolish rich old man who buys a young bride, only to be cuckolded and hurried to his grave. Rowlandson's class caricature is precise — the husband reads as moneyed but ridiculous, the wife as calculating. Aquatint gave caricaturists a tonal warmth impossible in pure etching. Works like this, published in bound series, trained readers to follow sequential narrative across plates — the direct ancestor of the comic book's chapter structure.