Bartholomew Fair

A coloured aquatint by Joseph Bluck after Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson, this crowded nocturnal scene depicts Smithfield's annual Bartholomew Fair — booths blazing with gaslight against a cloud-torn moon, performers on a stage frontispiece, and a London crowd rendered with Rowlandson's characteristic social sweep: working-class revellers, pickpockets, and fairground hawkers jostling alongside fashionable spectators. The poor are drawn broad and ungainly — class caricature standard to the period, where bodily exaggeration signalled moral and social rank. Aquatint's wash-like tonal range suited such atmospheric night scenes. Rowlandson sits at the direct headwaters of comics history: his sequential Tour of Dr. Syntax and Dance of Death series established the illustrated narrative page that Töpffer, then Ally Sloper's publishers, then American newspaper strip artists would inherit.