The Loss of the Faro Bank; or, The Rook's Pigeon'd

An etching by James Gillray — the master of British print satire — this crowded scene lampoons aristocratic gambling culture around a faro table. A bloated, overdressed woman throws up her hands in theatrical horror as a figure slips through the door; onlookers register panic, guilt, and scheming in equal measure. Gillray's line work deploys grotesque exaggeration of body and costume to mock the idle rich: the figures are rendered with the bulging eyes, slack jaws, and inflated flesh his era used routinely to signal moral failure and class absurdity. Such physiognomic distortion — rooted in the traditions Hogarth codified and Rowlandson extended — fed directly into 19th-century illustrated comic sheets and, eventually, the sequential comic strip.