*Gentle Emetic* — James Gillray after John Sneyd

A bilious patient slumps in a ladder-back chair, face contorted mid-heave, a ceramic bowl on the table before him; a second man grips his head with exaggerated solicitude. The title's irony is the joke — there is nothing gentle about it. Gillray's hand-coloured etching deploys the swollen, rubbery physiognomy his era used freely to render suffering as farce, flattening class and bodily dignity alike into grotesque spectacle. That visual grammar — exaggerated anatomy, compressed narrative, sardonic caption — is precisely the inheritance the comic strip claimed a century later. Gillray, Rowlandson, and their Continental counterparts in the German *Bilderbogen* tradition taught sequential and single-panel graphic art how a printed line could carry irony, cruelty, and comedy simultaneously.