Harmony before Matrimony

James Gillray's etching shows a young couple sharing a music sheet beside a tall harp, their faces close in apparent romantic accord, while two cats spar on the floor below — a wry visual pun on "harmony" that is already fraying at its edges. The cats do the satirical work the title withholds: courtship is performance, and discord lurks. Gillray, the dominant printmaker of Regency Britain, used the copperplate etching tradition — fine cross-hatching, expressive line — inherited from Hogarth and passed forward to Rowlandson and eventually to the illustrated comic press. This domestic-comedy vein of social caricature, depicting middle-class aspiration and romantic self-deception, fed directly into the narrative-sequence picture sheets and, by the mid-nineteenth century, the comic strip itself.