Coming in at the Death

Coming in at the Death is the last of four humorous prints which parody the popular genre of fox-hunting prints and provide a comic view of the perils and pratfalls of the chase. The series was etched by Gillray but designed by the amateur artist Brownlow North whose "signature" includes a compass pointing (appropriately) north.

For more information about the genre of fox-hunting paintings and prints, the amateur artist Brownlow North, and the reason why we find amusement rather than distress in images like this, see my commentary on Hounds Finding.

The natural conclusion in a series of fox hunting prints was, of course, the death of the fox. It was usually depicted with the fox held aloft by the master of the hounds surrounded by his baying dogs. In Coming in at the Death, however, the usual image is pushed to the background and it is the plight of the two men about to plunge into a pool of water that takes center stage. The title then seems to refer to the humans in the print not the fox. But as Rowlandson later demonstrated (over and over) in his Dance of Death series, even death could be tamed into laughter by the deflationary techniques of caricature.*

See my essay on this subject, "Distance and Humor: The Art of Thomas Rowlandson," Eighteenth Century Studies, Vol. 11, No. 4, (Summer 1978), 457-472.

Sources and Reading

• Commentary from the British Museum on Coming in at the Death.
• "Brownlow North," Wikipedia
• "Fox hunting," Wikipedia
• Thomas Wright and R.H. Evans, Historical and Descriptive Account of the Caricatures of James Gillray #490
• Thomas Wright and Joseph Grego, The Works of James Gillray, the Caricaturist; With the History of His Life and Times p. 272

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