This humorous drawing shows a man – possibly Dance himself – having fallen asleep with a bottle of wine and smoking his pipe in bed. His maid is shown gingerly lifting the bed covers to remove the bottle of wine, presumably for her own enjoyment. Dance has revelled in detail, capturing the tester bed and the careful concentration of the maid, in her mob cap, as she carefully lifts the covers trying not to disturb her master.
George Dance, the son of a successful architect, also George, and brother to the painter Nathaniel, was himself an accomplished and celebrated architect. A founder member of the Royal Academy, Dance was also a fluent and prolific draughtsman. Dance never let architecture dominate his life. He was a man of wide-ranging interests, and in later years he gained greater satisfaction from arts other than architecture. He possessed considerable musical skill as an instrumentalist and composer: Haydn became a valued friend. His interest in drawing also grew: his distinctive and highly finished pencil profile portraits constituted a vivid gallery of Regency London's artistic establishment of the day, and etchings after them by William Daniell were published in 1804–14. Simultaneously, Dance delighted in producing humorous cartoons and caricatures and a sizeable body of his amusing drawings survives.
