A Vision of the First Mayor of London Appears to the Feasting Aldermen

Rowlandson's coloured etching skewers the Corporation of London's legendary gluttony. Around a laden Mansion House table, red-faced aldermen—rendered as grotesque lumps of flesh and self-importance, their girth a deliberate class joke at civic officialdom's expense—recoil in terror as a spectral first Mayor materialises from billowing smoke at right, one arm raised in reproach. A guest has toppled backward; crockery flies. The ghost is drawn with theatrical severity against the comic chaos, sharpening the moral contrast. This is Rowlandson at his most Hogarthian: sequential implied narrative, bodies as moral argument, excess made ridiculous rather than enviable. Such prints, sold as single sheets, trained audiences to read exaggerated physiognomy and visual irony—the direct visual grammar that would migrate, via illustrated periodicals and German Bilderbogen picture-sheets, into the modern comic strip.