Overindulgence in food and drink is one of the seven deadly sins. From Francois Rabelais' mid sixteenth-century odes to the subject of gluttony, Gargantua and Pantagruel, issue forth litanies of increasingly ridiculous foodstuffs and legendary accounts of competitive eating. These very corporeally-minded satires of Renaissance humanism remain entertainingly relevant in each new iteration. The André Derain color woodcuts for a 1943 edition in particular evoke this alimentary excess in more subtle ways than the text. A landscape appears from the point of view inside an eater's gaping maw, and a picnicking protagonist retains a comically firm grasp on both his oversize joint of meat and his jug of wine. A stronger spirit, gin, would prove even more tempting for the British public in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

William Hogarth's engraving of the gin-crazed denizens of "Gin Lane" demonstrated this problem in 1751, just as the government enacted strict legislation to tax and curtail its production. Nonetheless, an early nineteenth-century scrapbook with prints by George Cruikshank among others continued to stress gin's deleterious effect on society. In one volume, a loose woman demands a glass, possibly offering sexual services in return; in another, the alchemical-looking distillation apparatus of the "Gin Juggernath" looms above the hordes clamoring for its dubious nectar.

1. George Cruikshank and others, Scrapbook, British, 19th century. (Dorothy Braude Edinburg Art LLC)
2. George Cruikshank and others, Scrapbook, British, 19th century. (Dorothy Braude Edinburg Art LLC)
3. André Derain and François Rabelais, Pantagruel. Paris: Skira, 1943. (Dorothy Braude Edinburg Art LLC)
4. André Derain and François Rabelais, Pantagruel. Paris: Skira, 1943. (Dorothy Braude Edinburg Art LLC)