Parameter A prescribes the magnitude of the drop’s deformation, B the vertical bath deformation and C the horizontal extent of bath deformation. Minimizing the total potential energy of the drop and bath allows one to obtain the sessile profile of the drop–bath system and the corresponding values of the total surface and gravitational potential energy. Keeping A, B and C independent for the time being, while setting σD =σB =σ and ρD =ρB =ρ for the sake of simplicity, we obtain