A French Dentist Shewing a Specimen of His Artificial Teeth and False Palates

Rowlandson's coloured etching presents three figures in a comic scene of vanity and commerce: a French dentist — almost certainly N. Dubois de Chémant, pioneer of porcelain dentures — flanks a female patient whose gaping jaw displays his handiwork, while a prospective male client, scissors raised, inspects the result with his own ravaged teeth. The exaggerated jowls, bulging eyes, and rubbery flesh are quintessential Rowlandson. Etching with hand watercolour wash, the medium of Hogarth's moral series and Gillray's political assaults, this commercial print tradition — circulated in shop windows and bound albums — fed directly into sequential narrative art, panel composition, and the visual shorthand that shaped the modern comic strip.