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Blind Beggars Scuffling:
Late eighteenth-century drawing in black and white.
The dynamic drawing depicts two men engaged in a hand-to-hand fight. The longhaired man on the right has his head turned aside with eyelids lowered and teeth bared as he attacks the man on the left. He clutches the man’s throat, pressing his thumb into it, and tears at his neck with the other hand. Shoeless, his right leg hooks over his opponent’s left bent knee. His shirt clings to the sinewy muscles of his back. A hurdy-gurdy with elaborate wood and metal decorations hangs on a strap off his body. The cloaked man on the left wears a hat and leans backward on his bare feet. With eyeballs rolled upward and mouth agape, he grips a carved walking stick above the head of his attacker and draws his other hand back and low in a fist. A sleek, longhaired dog with a leash, frayed at the end, stands on its hind legs with the edge of the man’s cloak clamped in its teeth. A hat lays upside-down on the ground, right. Thick, horizontal wavy lines provide a background for the picture.
Described by Andrea Doane.
Image courtesy of Perkins School for the Blind.
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