Visiting the Sick

James Gillray's hand-coloured etching pictures the ailing Charles James Fox—bloated, turbaned, enthroned like an Ottoman potentate—receiving a grotesque parade of well-wishers: Whig politicians, military figures, a bishop, and a veiled allegorical Death lurking behind. The Ottoman costuming on Fox was a stock satirical shorthand associating him with Eastern despotism and perceived sympathy toward Napoleon. Gillray's acid line and vivid aquatint wash descend directly from Hogarth's moral series and anticipate the sequential visual rhetoric that would travel through broadsheet picture-sheets into the comic strip. Fox died in September 1806, making this one of Gillray's last shots at his favourite Whig target.