Eighty-Four Physiognomic Caricatures of English Eighteenth-Century Types

Isaac Cruikshank's etching after George Moutard Woodward crowds eighty-four head-and-shoulder portraits onto a single plate, marshaled in rows like a census of Georgian society. Tradesmen, clergymen, soldiers, fashionable ladies in towering bonnets, and rural laborers jostle without hierarchy. The title Physiognomical Studies invokes Johann Caspar Lavater's then-fashionable pseudo-science, which claimed facial features mapped character and class — a framework Woodward exploits for comic deflation rather than genuine classification. The physiognomic grid is also a direct ancestor of the comics page: discrete frames, varied types, sequential reading across a sheet. Cruikshank's father Isaac Sr. and son George would extend this tradition into the illustrated broadside and eventually the narrative picture-story, the immediate precursor of the comic strip.