Pity the Sorrows of a Poor Old Man! Whose Trembling Limbs Have Borne Him to Your Door

from Various Subjects Drawn from Life and on Stone, also known as the English Series

Printed by Charles Hullmandel, London; published by Rodwell and Martin, London

While in London in 1820 during the British exhibition of his masterwork, The Raft of the Medusa, Théodore Géricault began to produce a suite of scenes of daily life, known as his English Series, in which he chose to represent not the famous sites and royal classes of London but rather its unheroic workforce and urban poor. In these two lithographs from the series, Géricault juxtaposes the employed and unemployed, the well fed and the starving, the crippled and the able-bodied. These are not sentimental observations but matter-of-fact reportages that illustrate what the artist perceived as the dilemma of urbanization. Successfully marketed to an English public, the series was subsequently copied and reissued in France, though without either of these two images of urban outcasts included.