Two Scenes at Angelo's Fencing Academy, after Rowlandson

Two pen-and-wash scenes, reproduced here as wood engravings in a 1904 periodical, show the crowded interior of Henry Angelo's Bond Street fencing academy. In the upper image a woman in skirts—identified in the original caption as the Chevalier d'Éon, the celebrated cross-dressing French diplomat-swordsman—lunges against a male opponent before a press of spectators rendered in Rowlandson's characteristic loose, energetic line. Figures are plump, mobile, subtly ridiculous: the crowd is class-mixed and physically exaggerated in the mild comic register Rowlandson preferred over Gillray's savage political distortion. The lower scene repeats the academy setting circa 1786–90. Rowlandson's sequential, crowded compositions—figures spilling across a unified pictorial space to carry narrative forward—form a direct bridge between Georgian print satire and the panel-driven storytelling of the modern comic strip.