The Dance of Death: Tom Higgins

Rowlandson's aquatint shows a gouty, corpulent gentleman slumped in a garden chair, his bloated yellow belly spilling forward as a grinning skeleton — Death personified — reaches toward him from the right, while a panicked servant flees left. A small dog cowers beneath the table. The target is gluttony itself: the fat man's class comfort rendered grotesque, his excesses literally killing him. The verse caption confirms he will eat and drink no more. Aquatint's soft tonal washes gave Rowlandson warm, almost cheerful colour that sharpens the macabre joke. His Dance of Death series (1814–16) sits squarely in the English print-satire line from Hogarth's moral sequences through Gillray's political venom — sequential images organized around a single satirical idea, distributed as cheap coloured prints. That grammar of recurring character, panel-to-panel narrative, and exaggerated physiognomy passed directly into the Victorian comic periodical and, ultimately, the comic book.