A Pinch of Cephalic

A corpulent, grimacing gentleman jams snuff toward his nose while clutching what appears to be a bill of particulars, a clay pipe wedged in his other fist, a goblet of wine steaming at his elbow, and a small dog cowering underfoot. The fireplace, the portrait on the wall, and the scattered domestic props frame him as a man of means brought low by his own appetites. Cruikshank's hand-coloured etching inherits Gillray's exaggerated physique and contorted facial expression — hallmarks of the London print-shop satirical tradition that ran from Hogarth's moral sequences through Rowlandson's social grotesques. That tradition of sequential, speech-bearing pictorial comedy, sold as cheap broadsides and coloured prints, is the direct ancestor of the comic strip. The class condescension here — the gouty rich man undone by excess — is stock period rhetoric, wielded without sympathy for either the subject or the poor he implicitly ignores.