Progress of the Toilet — Dress Completed, Plate 3

Gillray's etching — precise, biting, finely cross-hatched — shows a fashionable young woman in a high-waisted Empire-line gown admiring herself in a tall dressing mirror while her maidservant stands aside clutching fan and shawl. The servant is rendered with the broad, unglamorous strokes Gillray routinely reserved for working-class figures: thick-necked, plain, a foil to her mistress's self-regard. The satire targets female vanity and Regency fashion excess rather than any named political figure — unusual for Gillray, who more often skewered Napoleon or George III. This domestic comedy descends directly from Hogarth's sequential moral prints and anticipates Rowlandson's social series. Such numbered-plate narratives — image advancing a story beat by beat — are among the direct ancestors of the comic strip.