A Hypochondriac Surrounded by Doleful Spectres

A well-dressed woman slumps in a chair, vapors rising around her, while Death and a procession of grim phantoms swirl overhead — imagined terrors conjured by a mind turned inward on itself. To the right, a rotund physician examines a comely young woman with conspicuous interest, deflating the hypochondriac's self-pity with comic contrast. Rowlandson's hand-coloured etching deploys the loose, energetic line he perfected under Gillray's influence, placing exaggerated bodies in morally legible tableaux. The class target is the leisured, fashionably anxious woman whose ailments are diagnosed as self-indulgence — a common satirical move that flattened female experience into joke. This print sits squarely in the Georgian caricature tradition — Hogarth's narrative staging, Gillray's grotesquerie — the sequential, panel-ready visual grammar from which the comic strip would directly inherit its vocabulary.