The Spanish Bull Fight — or — the Corsican Matador in Danger

A hand-colored etching — Gillray's preferred medium — set in an arena labelled Théâtre Royale de l'Europe. A figure in Napoleonic uniform is tossed violently by a powerful Spanish bull labeled "Spanish Crisis," while lesser bulls labeled "Prussian," "Dutch," and "Austrian" lie wounded or charge nearby. Crowned spectators — among them figures identifiable as the Russian tsar and the Ottoman sultan — watch from the box above in theatrical alarm. The caricature responds to the Peninsular War's opening: Spain, expected to capitulate, instead savages the Corsican matador. Gillray's grotesque distortion of faces and bodies descends directly from the continental caricatura tradition and fed directly into the sequential visual storytelling — exaggerated physiognomy, labeled actors, compressed narrative — that would define the comic strip a half-century later.