Doctor Botherum, The Mountebank

Rowlandson's hand-coloured etching crowds a market square with the full range of Georgian society pressed around a quack's portable stage. At centre, the charlatan "Doctor Botherum" gestures theatrically—wine glass raised, one leg kicked up—while costumed assistants clown beside him. Below, a woman swoons into a man's arms; children beg; a dog noses through the press. The scene descends directly from Hogarth's crowd compositions and feeds forward into Gillray's political grotesques—the exaggerated physiognomy, sequential implied narrative, and satirical "type" figures that would migrate through the German Bilderbogen picture-sheets and nineteenth-century illustrated press directly into the modern comic strip.