The Anatomist

A skeleton hangs on the open door like a grim coat-rack; a human skull broods on the cabinet. The old anatomist — rendered with Rowlandson's signature grotesquerie, jowled and leering — bends over his instrument case while a plump, fashionably dressed young woman tugs at him in alarm: the figure on the bed is plainly alive and terrified. The poster on the wall advertises a course of anatomical lectures, grounding the joke in real anxieties about body-snatching and the grave-robber trade that supplied Georgian dissection rooms. Rowlandson's hand-coloured aquatint line descends directly from Hogarth's moral sequences, and his exaggerated physiognomies — class-coded here through dress and posture — fed directly into the sequential comic imagery from which the modern comic strip would grow.