"Elegance Democratique" — Etching by James Gillray

Gillray shows a heavyset man in ill-fitting waistcoat, rumpled breeches, and a slightly too-tall top hat, leaning on a stout cane with one hand shoved in his pocket — the very picture of pretension undone by slovenliness. The caption quotes Lord Chesterfield on judging a man's mind by his manners and dress, making the figure a walking rebuttal to Chesterfield's own maxims. The satire targets the nouveau-riche or radical-sympathizing bourgeois who aspires to gentility but wears it badly — a class anxiety sharpened by post-Revolutionary nerves about 'democratic' leveling from France. Gillray's etching technique, with its rapid cross-hatching and swelling contour lines, distorts the body just enough to sting. This tradition of printed single-image satire — Hogarth's moral sequences, Rowlandson's grotesques, later Daumier's lithographs — fed directly into the sequential comic strip.