The Dance of Death: The Wedding

Rowlandson's aquatint shows a crowded church interior mid-ceremony: a skeletal Death, robed and presiding from the pulpit, blesses a mismatched bridal party below. The groom is corpulent and aging; the bride conspicuously young and fashionably dressed in Empire-waist white. Surrounding figures — rendered with the broad, rubbery physiognomy Rowlandson used to signal low breeding and moral vacancy — gape upward in comic oblivion. The class comedy is deliberate and unsparing: wealthy vulgarity purchasing youth, Death officiating as silent equalizer. Aquatint's soft tonal washes gave Rowlandson's line its characteristic warmth, distinguishing his work from Gillray's harsher etched bite. This *Dance of Death* series sits at the direct genealogical root of sequential comic art — recurring characters, narrative across plates, visual satire as popular print commodity.