The Flea and The Man
What makes "The Flea and the Man" stand above the dozens of illustrations inside the rich, nostalgic work of Aesop's Fables is Rackham's detailed, sketch-like linework. While it is not a large or colored illustration that consumes the page with its grandiose nature, it is an eye-catching work nestled between conniving foxes and wrathful goddesses. The art contradicts itself when broken down: individually, the monochromatic lines are harsh, rough, and sketchy in demeanor, but when all the harsh lines blend together, it weaves itself into an image with a beautiful attention to detail from the eyebrows to the fingertips and everything in between.
The fable is about a man who is repeatedly bitten by a flea until he can no longer tolerate its annoyance and laughs at the flea's pleads for mercy, eventually killing the bug by squashing it between his fingers. Like all of Aesop's fables, there is a moral at the end, with this one reading "do not waste your pity on a scamp." The illustration is rough and heavily detailed, especially so on the man's fingers and facial expression, representing cruel justice towards that which causes problems.
What is particularly interesting about the illustration is the amount of detail that went into drawing the fingers of the man, drawn to be deadly weapons that could easily squash the flea whenever he so pleased. At the beginning of the fable, he tolerates the annoyance, and the flea takes more, biting constantly until the human eventually becomes fed up with the behavior, shown in his irritated yet almost sadistic facial expression, and kills the flea.
Even after the flea begs for mercy, the man has already extended too much of his patience, and now pays the price with bites, which emphasizes the moral of "do not waste your pity on a scamp."