A Woman at Her Dressing Table Being Laced into Her Stays

James Gillray's etching captures a fashionable woman standing at a cluttered dressing table—wig, cosmetic pots, a hand mirror—while a maidservant cinches her corset from behind. The mistress examines a small bottle with the absorbed self-regard Gillray reserved for vanity; the servant strains at the laces with blunt, workmanlike effort. The class contrast is the point: the servant exists as labor, rendered stocky and plain against her employer's studied elegance. Gillray, the dominant British print satirist before his death in 1815, published through Hannah Humphrey's shop; his compositions—sequential implied narrative, compressed indoor staging, sharp social type—fed directly into Rowlandson's comic strips and, generations later, into the grammar of the comic book page itself.