Robert Price Indulging His Favorite Scene

A hand-colored etching — Isaac Cruikshank's sharp, crowded line-work inked with acid then manually tinted — depicts a chaotic bedchamber: ruffians tear apart a canopied royal bed while a crowned demon rides the back of a kneeling figure (Price) who peers voyeuristically through a hole at the carnage. A woman flees at right; skulls litter the floor. The title The Doctor Indulged with his Favorite Scene targets Richard Price, the Dissenting minister whose 1789 sermon praising the French Revolution had already drawn Edmund Burke's fury in Reflections on the Revolution in France. Cruikshank renders Price as both peeping Tom and devil's stooge, the crown he kneels on signaling his contempt for monarchy. Such partisan caricature — dense with symbolic props, speech scrolls, and grotesque physiognomy — descends directly from Hogarth's moralizing prints and Gillray's political venom, and feeds forward into the sequential visual storytelling that would eventually produce the comic strip.