Among Douce’s satirical prints, there is a full set of caricatures of clerics after designs by George Moutard (or Murgatroyd) Woodward (1760?-1809). When Mary Dorothy George catalogued the five prints from the series in the collection of the British Museum, she wrote “possibly there is a missing print: ? The Rector” (Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, vol. 6, p. 748). She was, of course, right -Douce’s set includes a portly rector grinning approvingly at the servant who brings a suckling pig to his table:
After G. M. Woodward, The Rector, 1790, etching and aquatint (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)
Moreover, a seventh print not mentioned in the catalogue depicts The Incumbent, an elderly cleric who reads his newspaper on a bench under a tree:
After G. M. Woodward, The Incumbent, 1790, etching and aquatint (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)
When I first saw the seven prints, I wondered whether Douce’s series was complete. Thanks to the verses below the images, I found the answer (and Woodward’s source) in this ‘Parody on the Speech of Jaques, in Shakespeare’s As you like it’:
[…] And Parsons are but men, like you or me.
They have their foibles, and their fopperies:
And one sees amongst them sundry characters.
To mention only seven -And first- the Curate […],
The rest of the poem, which appears on pp. 197-198 of the third volume of Richard Graves’s The Spiritual Quixote: or, the Summer’s Ramble of Mr Geoffry Wildgoose. A Comic Romance (London, 1773), provides the captions for the remaining prints in the set.
The prints after Woodward’s designs were published much later, on 1 December 1790, by William Holland. The reason for this might have been the enduring popularity of Graves’s parody, reproduced, for instance, in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1794 and in the Sporting Magazine in 1797.