La Belle Espagnole, ou la Doublure de Madame Tallien

Gillray's etching shows a full-length woman in Empire-line dress, her hair piled in extravagant curls, her bearing arch and self-possessed — the caption names her 'La Belle Espagnole,' a stand-in for Thérésa Tallien, the celebrated French Revolutionary socialite. The figure reads as visibly pregnant, the joke pointed and morally loaded. The fine cross-hatched etching line descends directly from Hogarth's narrative plates; Gillray pushed that inheritance toward vicious personal lampoon. This tradition — single image, text caption, moral or political sting — is the direct ancestor of the sequential comic strip and, by extension, the comic book page.