The Dance of Death: The Sot

A bloated drunkard slumps in a wheelbarrow, barrels tumbling around him, while a skeletal Death seizes him by the collar and an enraged woman — wife or landlady — raises her stick to strike. Geese scatter; a dog bolts; onlookers gape from a tavern doorway. Rowlandson's aquatint, with its loose, looping line and acid washes of pink and ochre, belongs to the English print-satire tradition that ran from Hogarth's Gin Lane through Gillray's political grotesques. The figure of Death as comic interloper descends from medieval danse macabre woodcuts, here domesticated into Georgian low comedy. The caption reads: Drunk and alive, the man was thine, / But dead and drunk, why — he is mine. Class contempt for plebeian intemperance is the unambiguous moral freight — reform literature dressed as farce. This sequential storytelling in single sheets is a direct ancestor of the comic strip.