The Dance of Death: The Coquette

Rowlandson's aquatint shows Death—rendered as a leering, hollow-eyed skeleton in red coat and breeches—seizing a fashionably dressed young woman while her companion recoils and an elderly servant cowers in horror. The bedroom setting, with its draped four-poster and dressing-table clutter, frames the moral plainly: vanity invites an early end. The coloured aquatint technique, combining etched line with soft tonal washes, gave Rowlandson's figures their characteristic fluid energy—looser and more carnivalesque than Gillray's acid cross-hatching. This plate belongs to Rowlandson's *Dance of Death* series, itself descended from medieval *danse macabre* imagery refracted through 18th-century English print satire. Such serial narrative sequences—moralized, sequential, mass-produced—fed directly into the Victorian illustrated press and, eventually, the comic strip's episodic grammar.