Mutual Accusation - When once you've told & cant recall a Lye / Boldly, percist in't or your Fame will die. /Learn this ye Wives, with unrelenting Claws /Or right or wrong, Afsert your husbands cause.
Mr. Bunbury del. Js.Bretherton f.
Publish'd by Bretherton 3d. January 1774.
Etching, platemark 235 x 300mm (9¼ x 11¾"). Good margins; glued to backing sheet; occasional spotting.
Two rival quack doctors (whose premises, both advertising Antiscorbutic Pills to prevent scurvy, face each other) argue while their wives fight each other. Even their cats and dogs are involved in the rivalry! Etched after Henry Bunbury, an amateur printmaker who subsequently enjoyed a successful career as a designer for printsellers. 'Prints by Bunbury an his imitators were conspicuously 'polite' and appealed, like novels, 'To the Fashionable World and Polite circles'. Of good family, amply endowed with social skills, a beautiful wife and connections in high society, Bunbury's appeal was not solely aesthetic' and his admirers 'recognized his comic talent, his informed enthusiasm for literature, and his ability to draw a momentary pang with something of the sensitivity with which Sterne could write it' (Clayton). The dubious claims of both are emphasised by the crest top centre, featuring two ducks and the motto 'quack quack quack'.
BM Satire 5279; see Timothy Clayton, 'The English Print, 1688-1802', p.245.
[Ref: 1062] £190.00
Publish'd by Bretherton 3d. January 1774.
Etching, platemark 235 x 300mm (9¼ x 11¾"). Good margins; glued to backing sheet; occasional spotting.
Two rival quack doctors (whose premises, both advertising Antiscorbutic Pills to prevent scurvy, face each other) argue while their wives fight each other. Even their cats and dogs are involved in the rivalry! Etched after Henry Bunbury, an amateur printmaker who subsequently enjoyed a successful career as a designer for printsellers. 'Prints by Bunbury an his imitators were conspicuously 'polite' and appealed, like novels, 'To the Fashionable World and Polite circles'. Of good family, amply endowed with social skills, a beautiful wife and connections in high society, Bunbury's appeal was not solely aesthetic' and his admirers 'recognized his comic talent, his informed enthusiasm for literature, and his ability to draw a momentary pang with something of the sensitivity with which Sterne could write it' (Clayton). The dubious claims of both are emphasised by the crest top centre, featuring two ducks and the motto 'quack quack quack'.
BM Satire 5279; see Timothy Clayton, 'The English Print, 1688-1802', p.245.
[Ref: 1062] £190.00