Scene from Old Mortality

George Cruikshank's steel engraving illustrates a mounted encounter from Walter Scott's 1816 novel Old Mortality, set during Scotland's Covenanting conflicts. Two figures on horseback confer urgently beneath dense trees while armed riders mass in the middle distance — Scott's landscape rendered with the tight cross-hatching and dramatic chiaroscuro Cruikshank inherited from Hogarth and Gillray. The figures are costumed in mid-17th-century dress; class distinctions are signaled through posture and mount quality rather than ethnic caricature, which was Cruikshank's norm when illustrating prose fiction rather than political lampoons. Cruikshank sits precisely at the hinge between the single-plate satirical print tradition and sequential narrative art: his later temperance series The Bottle (1847) pushed that image-sequence logic directly toward what would become the comic strip.