Taking Physick

A sallow, grimacing man in nightcap and open shirt stands before a fireplace, one leg raised, his face contorted in disgust as he contemplates a small cup of medicine. Bottles of physic line the mantelpiece; a warming pan sits in the hearth. James Gillray's hand-colored etching deploys the exaggerated physiognomy he learned from John Hamilton Mortimer and sharpened into a weapon—bulging eyes, rubbery lips, a frame gone slack with illness and self-pity. The target here is not a politician but a recognizable social type: the hypochondriac gentleman reduced to undress and misery. Gillray's output, alongside Rowlandson's, fed directly into the sequential visual comedy of early comic strips; their single-plate narratives taught readers to read exaggerated bodies as compressed stories, the grammar comics inherited wholesale.