Charming Well Again

A bandaged convalescent sits at a well-laid table, attacking a roast fowl and raising a glass of wine, while a broad, ruddy-faced attendant hovers behind him with a bowl — both figures grinning with comic satisfaction. The caption reads Charming well again. Gillray's hand is legible in the bulbous noses and exaggerated flesh tones; Sneyd's etching reproduces that vigour in the crosshatching and hand-applied colour. The satire, if personal, targets the indulgent appetite of recovery — illness as excuse for excess. Gillray belongs to the rowdy British print tradition (Hogarth, Rowlandson) that lampooned gluttony and class pretension in shop-window broadsides sold for a shilling. Those single-sheet comic prints — sequential, exaggerated, morally coded — are the direct ancestors of the comic strip and, by descent, the comic book.