Cracking a Joke!!
Medium
Hand-colored etching
Dimensions
Sheet: 9 3/16 × 9 3/8 in. (23.4 × 23.8 cm)
Classification
Prints
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1959
Accession Number
59.533.1533
Tags
Art Historical Context
Step into the cheeky world of Regency-era with *Cracking a Joke!! a hand-colored etching from around 1813, now housed in the Metropolitan of Art's Drawings and Prints department. Created by designer George Murgatroyd, published by Thomas T, and etched by the masterful Thomas Rowlandson, this compact print (9 3/16 × 9 3/8 in.) captures a lively moment of male camaraderie through humor. Rowlandson, a of British caricature during the Napoleonic Wars, excelled at skewering social follies with exaggerated features and sharp wit. The tags—satire, men, smoking, drinking—hint at a boisterous scene of...