*Gentle Emetic*, after James Gillray

A stout, miserable patient slumps in a Windsor chair, face contorted with nausea, a large basin and teapot waiting on the table beside him. Behind him, a heavyset attendant grips his head with both hands — the 'gentle' of the title biting with irony. Gillray's original design deploys the broad, bulbous physiognomy he applied to lower-class and gentry figures alike: exaggerated jowls, slack mouth, bovine suffering. Aquatint-style hand-colouring sharpens the comedy into near-theatrical tableaux. The print belongs squarely to the Georgian satirical tradition Gillray dominated alongside Rowlandson — rapidly etched, cheaply coloured, sold from London print-shop windows — the visual vernacular that would migrate, via illustrated newspapers and German Bilderbogen picture-sheets, directly into the sequential panel grammar of the modern comic strip.