The Dance of Death: Time & Death, and Goody Barton

Rowlandson's aquatint stages the medieval *danse macabre* as low English comedy: a skeletal Death, grinning and angular, seizes a stout village woman outside a country alehouse while an emaciated Father Time drives a death-cart piled with corpses, his scythe raised over a panicking crowd. The printmaking technique — aquatint washed in watercolour tints — gives the carnage a deceptively cheerful palette. The peasant figures carry the broad class caricature standard to Georgian satire: red-faced, thick-limbed, ridiculous in their terror, their low station marking them as natural victims of mortality's farce. Rowlandson's sequential *Dance of Death* series (published by Ackermann) bridges the single satirical plate and the narrative comic strip, anticipating the page-by-page storytelling that would become the comic book.