A Burgess of Warwick Lane

Gillray's coloured etching shows a solitary, pompous figure—identified in the plate's caption as a burgess of Warwick Lane—viewed entirely from behind, mincing forward on tiptoe in buckled shoes and striped stockings, brown coat thick with brass buttons, white pigtail curling beneath a cocked tricorn. The rear view is the joke: the man is all self-importance and no face. Warwick Lane housed the College of Physicians, so the target is almost certainly a medical grandee, his social pretension lampooned through exaggerated posture rather than grotesque facial distortion. Gillray's fine etching line, hand-tinted in flat washes, belongs squarely to the London print-shop tradition—Hogarth's moral sequences, Rowlandson's roving pen—that trained the eye to read sequential picture narratives, the direct ancestor of the comic strip.