Counseller and Client

A hand-coloured etching — the dominant satirical medium of Georgian London — showing two corpulent, white-wigged men wedged together on a bench. The figure in dark coat reads aloud from a document; his companion, hat in lap, listens with an expression mixing hope and credulity. Books lie scattered at their feet, the standard shorthand for learned professions. Rowlandson's line is loose and fleshy compared with Gillray's wire-tight cruelty: both men are bloated, self-satisfied, their bulk a class joke at the expense of the legal profession's fees and its clients' gullibility. The exaggeration of body — jowls, belly, splayed legs — belongs to the Hogarthian tradition of moral physiognomy that would travel through Daumier's lithographed lawyers, into newspaper strips, and eventually into the stock comic-book figure of the pompous authority figure punctured by a single panel.