Doctor Convex and Lady Concave

A hand-coloured etching — acid-bitten line given wash by a colorist's brush — pairs two figures whose bodies literalize their names: a vast, red-faced man in a blue coat, belly straining his waistcoat, leans toward a thin, pink-gowned woman who juts her sharp chin back at him. The caption quotes Greville: Man is the only creature endowed with the power of laughter; is he not also the only one that deserves to be laughed at? Rowlandson works squarely in the Hogarthian tradition of physiognomic comedy — body as moral or social index — that ran through Gillray's political venom and would flow forward into newspaper comic strips and eventually the comic book panel. The class target here is bourgeois self-satisfaction rather than ethnic othering, the joke purely geometric: two London types whose shapes make an argument the caption only finishes.