Laurence Sterne

designed by Thomas Patch
1769

Met Museum 2013.939

The inscription below the image is a quotation from Tristram Shandy:

; and when Death himself Knocked at my door
; ye bad him come again; and in so gay a tone
; of carelss indifference, did ye do it, that he
; doubted of his Commission.  There must cert:
; ainly be some Mistake in this Matter," quoth he
                                                            T.S.

The quotation is translated into Italian on the right.

The British Museum describes the image as follows:

Satire on Laurence Sterne showing him as an elderly man encountering and dismissing the figure of Death. Sterne rises from a table where he has been writing, on which is a model of Diana of Ephesus in a bell-jar; under the table are two books, "Aris[totle]" and "Ovid" and a large jack-boot; on the wall behind hangs a plan of a fortification (a reference to Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy) and a clockwork machine which appears to be for tearing up books (it was suggested that Sterne plagiarised earlier works). Death appears through a door on the right, holding out an hour glass in which the sand has run into the lower part; in his other hand he carries a crutch rather than a scythe. In an oval below a moth hovers above a flaming torch.