A Fat Judge Pinching and Admiring the Fat on the Side of a Fat Bullock

Gillray's etching places a portly, top-hatted gentleman—rendered with the exaggerated girth typical of his class caricature—beside an equally outsized prize bullock, both figures competing for supremacy of bulk. The scene mocks the Georgian agricultural improvement movement and its Smithfield Club showmen, wealthy landowners who bred cattle to grotesque proportions and preened over them like connoisseurs over sculpture. The caption 'FAT CATTLE' collapses judge and beast into one satirical category. Gillray's biting line work—cross-hatched shadows, swollen silhouettes, the scatter of geese and pigs below—exemplifies the London print-shop tradition that ran from Hogarth through Rowlandson and fed directly into the sequential panel satire from which the comic strip descended.