The Dance of Death: The Schoolmaster

Rowlandson's aquatint drops a leering skeleton—Death personified—into a schoolroom mid-lesson, sending children tumbling over benches and each other in comic terror. The teacher, rendered as a goggle-eyed grotesque in a fool's cap, recoils from the apparition hovering over his celestial globes. A caption below reads Death, with his dart, proceeds to flog—a sardonic joke on the era's brutal schoolroom discipline, collapsing the schoolmaster's own cruelty into Death's work. Rowlandson's loose, fluid etched line, hand-washed in watercolour, exemplifies the aquatint caricature tradition he shared with Gillray: expressive distortion of face and body used for social critique. These sequential Dance of Death plates—narrative images with verse captions—are direct ancestors of the comic strip, translating medieval danse macabre allegory into the vernacular print culture from which comics descend.