Pastime in Portugal, or a Visit to the Nunnerys

A hand-colored etching by Thomas Rowlandson, Britain's most prolific Georgian caricaturist, this print shows British military officers—faces rendered with the exaggerated, rubbery distortion Rowlandson favored—leering through a convent grille at Portuguese nuns during the Peninsular War. The nuns return curious, even flirtatious glances; one passes an object through the bars. The satire targets the British officer class's alleged licentiousness abroad, cloaked as comedy at Catholic Portugal's expense. Rowlandson's fluid etched line, enriched with watercolor wash, sits squarely in the Gillray–Hogarth tradition of printed moral-comic narrative—sequential, gestural, crowd-pleasing—that sold through London print shops and fed directly into the illustrated story sheets, comic almanacs, and eventually the comic strip format itself.