Franz Joseph Gall and the Phrenology Cabinet

Rowlandson's coloured etching skewers the fashionable pseudoscience of phrenology, then sweeping London drawing rooms. At centre, Franz Joseph Gall — bulbous-nosed, pot-bellied — gestures theatrically while a colleague thrusts a grinning skull toward two other men whose own grotesquely exaggerated features ironically demonstrate the 'science' being lectured on. Shelves behind them catalogue skulls alongside busts labelled Liars, Thieves & Murderers and Poets, Dramatists, Actors. The comedy is self-defeating: if faces reveal character, what do these leering, rubicund men of learning reveal about themselves? Rowlandson's fluid etched line, softened by hand-applied watercolour wash, belongs to the great British satirical print tradition — Hogarth's moral narratives, Gillray's political venom — whose sequential visual storytelling and character exaggeration fed directly into the newspaper comic strip and eventually the modern comic book.