The Dance of Death: The Bishop and Death

Rowlandson's aquatint places a corpulent bishop — fleshy, pink-capped, sprawled in his chair mid-sermon — against a skeletal Death who prances toward him holding an hourglass, its sand nearly spent. A thin curate observes from the shadows, powerless. The class target is unmistakable: the overfed, indolent high churchman, a fixture of Regency anticlerical satire, rendered with the broad physical exaggeration Rowlandson perfected. The aquatint's soft washes of color amplify the grotesque comedy. Rowlandson's *Dance of Death* series adapts the medieval *Totentanz* tradition — Death claiming every rank — into Georgian social critique, sitting squarely in the lineage from Hogarth's moral sequences through Gillray's political savagery. These sequenced, character-driven print series are direct ancestors of the comic strip's storytelling grammar.