The Dance of Death: The Next Heir

A skeletal Death rides one of the lead horses of a careening open carriage, waving his arm toward a fashionably dressed woman who clings to her seat as the vehicle lurches through a village gateway. Gentlemen on horseback scatter; dogs flee; working-class bystanders — rendered with the broad, rubbery distortion Rowlandson applied to figures of every rank — gape from the left. The caption, partially legible beneath, ties the chaos to inheritance and mortality. Aquatint gave Rowlandson's fluid pen-line its characteristic wash-tone warmth, ideal for comic narrative. The print belongs to his Dance of Death series (1814–16), a Georgian updating of the medieval danse macabre tradition. Rowlandson's sequential comic imagery — moralized, crowd-filled, readable panel by panel — fed directly into the Victorian illustrated press and, eventually, the comic strip.