A Hypochondriac Surrounded by Doleful Spectres

Thomas Rowlandson's coloured etching shows a fashionably dressed woman seated in a comfortable parlour, overwhelmed by her own imagined terrors: a skeletal Death figure looms behind her wielding a scythe, naked wretches writhe in smoky vapour at left, and a hearse materialises from thin air — all projections of a mind convinced it is dying. At right, a portly physician and his companion look on with undisguised skepticism. The class commentary cuts both ways: hypochondria was coded as a wealthy person's luxury complaint, and the doctor's smug corpulence signals the profitable trade in imagined illness. Rowlandson inherited Hogarth's gift for crowded, morally layered scenes and pushed it toward a looser, more theatrical line — exactly the sequential visual storytelling energy that would feed directly into the nineteenth-century comic strip.