Dr. Donovan

James Hopwood's stipple engraving reproduces a Rowlandson sketch of Dr. Jeremiah Donovan—physician, writer, or wit; the inscription names him but does not specify his profession—shown slumped in an armchair, spectacles perched on his nose, a sheaf of papers raised to his lips in a gesture of musing self-satisfaction. Ink bottles sit at his elbow. The figure is fleshy, the coat straining at the buttons: Rowlandson's habitual shorthand for comfortable, self-indulgent prosperity, applied here without the savage distortion he reserved for political targets. Rowlandson sits at the hinge point in print-satire history—between Hogarth's moralizing scenes and the single-panel newspaper cartoon—and his quick, characterful sketches of recognizable individuals fed directly into the tradition of sequential comic imagery that would eventually produce the comic strip.