Plutarch restored: an anachronatic metempsychosis.
A set of twenty-four caricature plates drawn by Thomas Worth and issued by George Ward Nichols in 1862, retelling Plutarch's ancients as figures transplanted into mid-nineteenth-century American parlours, bar-rooms and kitchens for a humour-reading public. The lithographs are line-and-crosshatch drawings on pale grounds, mixing tunics, sandals, crested helmets and antique stools with cast-iron stoves, tea tables, draped curtains and punch bowls, supplying costume hybrids, interior props and Greek-key ornament for collage and spot illustration.
