English caricature

Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827) was among the supreme talents of the golden age of British caricature. Working chiefly in pen and watercolor over etched outlines, he produced a vast, rollicking record of Georgian life — crowds and taverns, coaches and quacks, the vain and the greedy — rendered with a fluent, curving line and an unfailing eye for the comic in human behavior. His best-known creation, the ridiculous schoolmaster Doctor Syntax, ran through illustrated volumes that paired his pictures with comic verse, a partnership of image and text that rhymes with the picture-stories elsewhere in this gallery. Rowlandson's importance to the comics lies in the art of caricature itself: the disciplined exaggeration that lets a drawn figure telegraph character, class, and folly instantly, without a word. Sold as affordable prints and displayed in shop windows, his satires trained a broad public to read pictures as commentary. Every cartoonist who has ever bent a nose or ballooned a belly to make a point works in a tradition Rowlandson helped perfect — the caricaturist's line that the comic book would one day inherit.