Miseries of Human Life: The Hairdresser's Torment

Rowlandson's hand-coloured etching illustrates a plate from James Beresford's enormously popular Miseries of Human Life (1806–07), a comedy of bourgeois irritations. A stout woman in yellow winces as a hairdresser wrenches her tangled back hair while a maidservant drags a matted forelock across her grimacing face; in the background a similarly suffering man endures the same fate. The caption explains the tangle resulted from 'poking curiously about on board of Ship.' Rowlandson renders his figures with the exaggerated bulk and florid discomfort typical of his class-inflected comedy — his prosperous subjects are neither flattered nor spared. This tradition of sequential comic vignettes, inherited from Hogarth's narrative series and refined by Gillray's political savagery, fed directly into the illustrated comic periodicals and picture-sheets that preceded the modern comic strip.