The Dance of Death: The Maiden Ladies

A skeletal Death, lantern in hand, bursts through a parlor door, sending a roomful of aging spinsters into shrieking chaos — cards scattered, a lapdog fleeing, one woman collapsed in a faint. The caption reads Be not alarmed — I'm only come / To choose a wife, & light her home. Rowlandson's coloured aquatint — acid-etched line flooded with watercolor wash — belongs to his Dance of Death series, a Georgian reworking of the medieval danse macabre tradition. The caricature deploys the stock figure of the desperate, ridiculous old maid, a class joke as much as a mortality joke, standard in the period's print-shop culture. Rowlandson's fluid, grotesque line — bodies boneless and bulging — fed directly into the sequential comic strip form that followed within decades.