Margaret Potter, Born at Glasgow 1596

This small portrait etching depicts an elderly woman shown in sharp profile — hooded cap, layered collar, deeply lined face — rendered with the cross-hatched precision characteristic of early nineteenth-century intaglio printmaking. The subject is identified as Margaret Potter, allegedly born in Glasgow in 1596, making her over 120 years old if the claim were true; centenarian spectacles were a popular curiosity genre of the period, blending portraiture with mild freakshow appeal. George Cruikshank, who produced this after a drawing by J. Smith, was simultaneously Britain's foremost political caricaturist, working in a tradition running from Hogarth through Gillray and Rowlandson — a lineage of sequential visual satire and exaggerated physiognomy that fed directly into the comic strip. The crone type deployed here carried class condescension standard to the era.