A Man and a Young Woman Embrace, Watched by a Young Girl and a Dog

Rowlandson's etching — worked up in pen-and-ink wash over a drypoint skeleton, then bitten in acid — catches a rotund, barrel-legged man clutching a young woman in a kitchen or tavern interior. Crockery crowds the shelves; a wine glass and jug litter the floor; a child and dog observe from the doorway, the girl's expression mixing alarm with amusement. The handwritten caption reads Hug-mug-gin, a pun on smugness, mugs of gin, and the embrace itself. Rowlandson's stock-in-trade was bodily excess: red-nosed, soft-bellied men pursuing women across class lines, the joke always at the expense of appetite poorly governed. This vein of printed comic narrative — single-plate, sold cheaply, circulated in print-shop windows — runs directly into the sequential panel tradition that became the comic strip.