The Dance of Death: The Glutton

Rowlandson's aquatint — its acid-bitten lines hand-finished in warm washes — shows Death as an animated skeleton crashing a dinner party, sending guests reeling in grotesque panic. The corpulent host, red-faced and wide-eyed, recoils from the uninvited guest seated at his laden table; a buxom serving woman throws her arms up; a fat man at left raises a dish in alarm. The class target is explicit: gluttony is a rich man's sin, and Death repays it personally. Part of Rowlandson's serial *Dance of Death* (1816–17), the image descends directly from medieval *danse macabre* imagery filtered through Hogarth's narrative print sequences — the same sequential moral storytelling, one scene per plate, that would eventually structure the comic strip panel grid.