Grotesque Hybridity in the Pedagogical Intent of Thomas Rowlandson's Comparative Anatomy

Abstract

An understudied group of sketchbooks, titled Comparative Anatomy Resemblances between the Countenances of Men and Beasts (1822-1827), prepared by the British graphic satirist Thomas Rowlandson (1767-1827) feature intriguing juxtapositions and amalgams of animals, humans, and vegetables, but have nevertheless been virtually ignored in the discourses on the intersections of art, science, and satire. Through visual analysis, I argue that Rowlandson’s Comparative Anatomy is a pedagogical tool that engages with the Romantic grotesque which was being explored in art in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and strongly employs hybridity, a device that can be found through the modes of Rowlandson’s artistic expression and within the work’s very materiality.