‘More Miseries’, 1807

Description

Mounted hand coloured etching, entitled ‘MORE MISERIES.’, designed and etched by Thomas Rowlandson, and published by Rudolph Ackermann in 1807.

This is one of 49 plates based on James Beresford’s work ‘Miseries of Human Life’. It shows a street scene in which an ox pins a fat man against the door of a bow-windowed chemists’ shop (the bottles are outlined in the window), the horns enclosing the man’s neck.

Men with bludgeons chase the ox, filling the broad street. Bullock-hunting, was a popular sport of East London, involving the cutting out of an ox from Smithfield which would then be chased. Lettered below design: “Being pinned up to a door, round the neck, by the horns of an enraged Over-driven, ox”.