The Library, from Poetical Sketches of Scarborough

Hand-coloured etching depicting the interior of a circulating library at the fashionable Yorkshire resort of Scarborough. Rowlandson's needle renders the room with architectural precision — tall glazed bookcases, hanging oil lamps, a counter at which a proprietor holds court — while the figures crowd the foreground in animated social performance. Ladies in Empire-line dresses, gentlemen in tall hats and tight breeches, and a servant or two fill the space; class distinction is inscribed in posture, dress, and spatial position, as it routinely was in Rowlandson's resort scenes. The coloring is typical of the London trade: flat washes applied by workshop hands over the etched line. Rowlandson's circulating-library scenes — sites of gossip, flirtation, and social display — belong to the tradition of graphic social commentary running from Hogarth through Gillray, in which sequential printed images trained the eye to read exaggerated figures as social types, the direct ancestor of the comic strip's cast of recurring characters.