De veldslag (The Battle)

A hand-colored etching — Rowlandson's characteristically fluid, looping line visible throughout — depicts a cavalry charge in chaotic rout: horsemen tumble, soldiers sprawl wounded or dead in the foreground, while a skeletal figure of Death rides triumphantly atop a cannon on the ridge above. The caption reads, roughly, Such is, alas, the common story / Of Blood & Wounds, of Death & Glory — anti-war irony directed at the Napoleonic era's cult of martial glory, published the year of Waterloo. Rowlandson's grotesque figures owe much to Hogarth's moral sequencing and anticipate Gillray's political savagery. This tradition of sequential, captioned satirical prints — circulated as cheap sheets — is the direct ancestor of the comic strip's panel-by-panel visual storytelling.