Comfort to the Corns

Gillray's hand-coloured etching shows a grotesquely exaggerated old woman — sunken-jawed, bulbous-nosed, wrapped in gaudy yellow and red — hunched over a smoky hearth, rasping a large file across the corns on her bare foot. A black cat curls at her feet; onions hang from the beam above. The image is pure genre comedy, deploying the exaggerated physiognomy Gillray applied equally to kings and commoners: the aged poor body rendered as grotesque spectacle, reflecting Georgian-era class condescension toward working-class subjects. Gillray's etched line — bitten deep, then selectively hand-coloured for the print trade — descends directly from Hogarth's moral sequences and anticipates Rowlandson's social vignettes. This tradition of sequential satirical print publishing, sold cheaply in shop windows, is the direct ancestor of the comic strip panel format.