The Dance of Death: The Hunter Unkennelled

Rowlandson's aquatint — its hand-applied washes of ochre, red, and grey giving the print a warmth that bites — shows Death as an articulated skeleton crashing a hunting party's feast, seizing a corpulent squire while guests recoil in theatrical horror. A dog bolts, servants gawp from the gallery, and a rider visible through the arch suggests the hunt continues oblivious. The figures are rendered with the broad, fleshy grotesquerie Rowlandson perfected: bloated bodies, slack mouths, exaggerated forms. The Dance of Death series belongs to a centuries-old danse macabre tradition reprocessed through Georgian print satire — the sequential, moralized storytelling that fed directly into the comic strip.