A French Dentist Shewing a Specimen of his Artificial Teeth and False Palates

Rowlandson's hand-coloured etching crowds three grotesquely exaggerated heads into the plate: the French dentist N. Dubois de Chémant flanked by a broad-faced woman displaying her mineral teeth and a prospective male patient whose own ruined mouth gapes in horror or wonder. The caricature weaponizes physiognomy as comedy — bloated cheeks, bulging eyes, and fleshy excess rendered in Rowlandson's fluid intaglio line, then flooded with watercolour washes. The Frenchman's foreignness is itself part of the joke, a common xenophobic register in British print satire of the Napoleonic period. This sheet belongs to the Hogarth-to-Rowlandson tradition of single-image narrative prints whose sequential energy, speech-bubble logic, and grotesque type-characters flowed directly into the comic strip form that followed within a generation.