Easing the Tooth-ach

A corpulent patient, mouth wrenched open in agony, grips a stool while a red-coated tooth-drawer forces his fingers into the gaping jaw. Gillray renders both figures as grotesques — bulging eyes, flushed cheeks, distorted mouths — deploying the exaggerated physiognomy that Georgian caricature inherited from Hogarth and refined into a commercial print culture sold through London shop windows. The class comedy is pointed: the fashionably dressed patient suffers at the hands of a tradesman-practitioner, dentistry not yet a genteel profession. Stipple engraving, with its tonal softness and capacity for hand-colouring, gave Gillray's office flesh and fabric a lurid warmth. This tradition of sequential comic exaggeration — single sheet expanding into strip — runs directly into the Bilderbogen picture-sheets of Busch and onward to the newspaper comic strip and the comic book page.