Thomas Rolandson est un caricaturiste de la fin du 19 e siècle. Il reprend la danse macabre en l’ajustant aux coutumes et mœurs de son époque.

Ce que je trouve significatif, c’est l’aspect beaucoup plus populaire de cette danse macabre. La mort y approche plutôt ceux dont les habitudes de vie sont un symbole de la dépravation et de l’excès politique. On ne s’attaque plus aux nobles mais aux nouveaux segments d’une population régie par l’économie plutôt que la religion.

Aussi, il m’apparaît pour la première fois que la mort est accompagnée d’un comparse, tenant à sa main une faux, ce qui en fait le Reaper, l’instrument de la mort, dissassocié de la mort elle-même. S’agit-il d’Azrael, l’Ange de la Mort? La résultante significative est de séparer la mort de l’acte de mourir.

As it appears, though dead so long,

Each scull is found to have a tongue.

When the old fool had drank his wine

And gone to rest, I will be thine.

Her tongue & temper to subdue;

Can only be perform’d by you.

On with your dead; and i’ll contrive

To bury this old fool – alive.

No scene so blest in Virtue’s eye,

As when the Man of Virtue dies.

Drunk and alive, the man was thine,

But dead & drunk, why, - he is mine

TIME & DEATH; their toughts impart

On works of learning & of art.

Some find their death by Swords & Bullets;

And some by fluids down the Gullet.

I have a secret art to cure

Each malady, which men endure.

Thomas Rolandson was a sketch artist from the end of the 19^th C. He utilizes the Danse Macabre again and, as have done all others, he adapts it to the morals and ethics of his days.

Also, it seems to me one of the first time that I see Death accompagnied by someone else, a worker, depicted handling a scepter, the instrument of death, dissociated from death itself. Is it Azrael, the Angel of Death? The significant result is to conceptually separate death from the act of dying.