Although he never formally took up art as his primary profession, Bunbury took drawing lessons in both England and Italy and was an amateur master of the “burlesque” drawing. A number of amateurs were active in the comic genre with a more naïve or cruder version of the style used by professionals like James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, whose works can also be seen in this gallery. This style of drawing seems appropriate to illustrate scenes from the popular eighteenth-century novel Tristram Shandy  by Laurence Sterne.  This comic novel is free-flowing and expressive in a manner similar to the illustrations shown here.  

Much of Sterne’s novel is concerned with the events leading up to the hero’s birth. Here the servant Obadiah, hurrying to send for the “man-midwife” Dr. Slop who is to attend Tristram’s mother, has collided with the doctor and knocked him off his horse.

Chandra Mosley