The Last Drop

A florid, corpulent gentleman in blue coat and yellow breeches tilts a wide bowl to drain its last contents, oblivious to the skeletal Death riding his back, one bony arm raised to strike. Empty and broken bottles litter the floor; a jug labeled Usquebaugh (whisky) sits among the wreckage. Rowlandson's colored etching — fluid, looping line-work bitten into copper and hand-tinted — belongs to the great British satirical print tradition running from Hogarth's Gin Lane through Gillray's political grotesques. The corpulent figure draws on class caricature standard to the era: excess coded as bourgeois self-destruction rather than aristocratic vice. That graphic shorthand — exaggerated body, allegorical figure, moral punchline in a caption — is the direct ancestor of the sequential comic strip and the single-panel gag that would fill early comic books.