The Dance of Death: The Schoolmaster

Rowlandson's aquatint drops a leering skeleton—Death personified—into a schoolroom mid-lesson, sending children tumbling over benches and each other in comic terror. The teacher, rendered as a goggle-eyed grotesque in a fool's cap, recoils from the apparition hovering over his celestial globes. A caption below reads *Death, with his dart, proceeds to flog*—a sardonic joke on the era's brutal schoolroom discipline, collapsing the schoolmaster's own cruelty into Death's work. Rowlandson's loose, fluid etched line, hand-washed in watercolour, exemplifies the aquatint caricature tradition he shared with Gillray: expressive distortion of face and body used for social critique. These sequential *Dance of Death* plates—narrative images with verse captions—are direct ancestors of the comic strip, translating medieval *danse macabre* allegory into the vernacular print culture from which comics descend.