The Bucephalus Riding Academy for Grown Gentlemen

Thomas Rowlandson's etching after Henry William Bunbury depicts a chaotic riding-school yard where adult gentlemen—none of whom appear remotely competent—struggle with uncooperative horses. One mount bucks violently while its rider flails; another horse wheels away; a small dog bolts underfoot; stable hands scatter. The title invokes Bucephalus, Alexander the Great's legendary warhorse, the joke being that these men could not manage a carthorse. Bunbury, a gentleman-amateur caricaturist, aimed his satire firmly at middle- and upper-class male pretension—the fashionable vanity of grown men purchasing equestrian credentials. Rowlandson's fluid, economical line gave the scene its kinetic absurdity. Published by Tegg, a prolific cheap-print seller, such sheets reached wide audiences and sit squarely in the British print-satire tradition—Hogarth's sequential moral scenes, Gillray's political grotesques—whose habit of narrative panels, comic exaggeration, and printed captions fed directly into the comic strip form of the following century.