Blank greetings card with envelope featuring:

Contemplation (James Burnett, Lord Monboddo) NPG D16263

© National Portrait Gallery, London

by John Kay

This is a satire on Monboddo's major study, Of the Origin and Progress of Language (1773-92), on which he is shown working. In the first of the six volumes, he controversially studied man as an animal, humanised by civil society and the arts, and maintained that the ape was a class of the human species. The picture hanging behind him of eight naked children with tails refers to his much ridiculed assertion that humans originally had them.

Card size: 125mm x 175mm

Images are printed in their original proportions, within a white border.