Connoisseurs examining a collection of George Morland's [graphic] / Js. Gillray ad vivam fect.

"A corner of a room hung with unframed canvasses is a background for five men, all in profile to the left. Four closely inspect a picture of two vast pigs lying outside a thatched hovel. The foremost, an old man, peers through spectacles held reversed; in his left hand is a 'Catalogue of Pictures by Morl...'. He is identified in the 'Illustrative Description', 1830, and by Grego, as Captain Baillie, the engraver and connoisseur, by Wright and Evans conjecturally as J. J. Angerstein. Behind is a profile identified as that of Mitchell, a banker; next is Caleb Whitefoord, looking through his glass (see BMSats 8169, 8725, &c). Behind him stands George Baker, a patron of English water-colour painters [print collector and bibliophile], holding a paper on which the word 'Pigs' is legible. Standing apart, with a grossly fat nan pressed on a canvas which he raises from the wall, is Mortimer, a picture-dealer and restorer. He puffs and spits from coarse protruding lips a picture, the head and shoulders of an enormous boar. The pictures burlesques of Morland's manner: (1) A grossly fat butcher inspects a fat pig displayed by a farmer; (2) a man with a pitchfork drives pigs from a stackyard; (3) a yokel embraces a haymaker in a barn while a braying donkey looks in at the door; (4) a mounted sportsman at an alehouse door takes a glass from a hugely fat woman; (5) a ragged woman with an infant on her back tells a stolid farmer his fortune. On the floor, in front of the connoisseurs, an empty frame and a bulging portfolio labelled 'Sketches from Nature by G. Morland' lean against the wall."--British Museum online catalogue.