The Last Gasp, or Toadstools Mistaken for Mushrooms

A grotesque domestic crisis unfolds in hand-coloured etching: a bloated, slack-jawed man in a nightcap slumps in his chair while a bent physician gestures at him, a horrified woman attends from the bed, and a military figure looms from behind. The target is bourgeois gluttony — the fat body rendered with Rowlandson's characteristic rubbery distortion, every figure exaggerated toward comic monstrosity. Class and physique are the satirical weapons here; the corpulent patient reads as self-indulgent and ridiculous, not pitiable. Rowlandson's sequential print work — narrative, visceral, crowd-pleasing — sits directly in the lineage from Hogarth's moral series through Gillray's political venom, feeding forward into the illustrated comic periodicals and eventually the comic strip itself.