Wha Wants Me?

James Gillray's etching depicts Henry Dundas—Scottish Home Secretary and close ally of William Pitt the Younger—as a grotesquely rotund figure in Highland dress: feathered bonnet, curled wig, and an enormous tartan cloak labeled 'Extracts from the Treasury' that conceals a smaller figure beneath. The caption Wha Wants Me? mocks Dundas's Scottish accent and his reputation as a dispenser of government patronage. The image belongs to the great London print-shop tradition—Hogarth's moral sequences, Rowlandson's grotesques, Gillray's own savage political portraits—that trained audiences to read exaggerated bodies as political argument, directly seeding the sequential visual comedy from which comic strips would grow.