ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

Mrs. Sarah Mapp

William Hogarth · Coloured etching by G. Cruikshank, 1819, after W. Hogarth

Mrs. Sarah Mapp
George Cruikshank's hand-coloured etching revives Hogarth's portrait of Sarah Mapp (c. 1706–1737), the celebrated—and widely mocked—bone-setter of Epsom. The figure wears a harlequin costume of diamond-patterned patches and a cocked cap, leaning heavily on a gold-knobbed cane, her face rendered with exaggerated jowls and a scowling, suspicious expression. The class caricature is deliberate: Mapp was a working-class woman who outperformed licensed physicians, and the grotesque body signals cultural anxiety about her gender and status as much as genuine satire of quackery. Cruikshank's crisp, biting line—learned directly from the Gillray–Rowlandson tradition—illustrates exactly the visual grammar of exaggeration, sequential moral commentary, and character type that would migrate into nineteenth-century illustrated papers and, eventually, the comic strip itself.

Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/