The Dissolution, or The Alchymist Producing an Ætherial Representation

Gillray's coloured etching pictures a powdered-wigged figure—understood as William Pitt the Younger—crouching before a furnace, working a crown-shaped bellows to heat a great alembic in which tiny parliamentarians swirl and dissolve. Gold coins spill across the floor; a basket receives the molten crown; Aqua Regia eats at the walls. The satire targets Pitt's 1796 dissolution of Parliament, equating cynical political calculation with fraudulent alchemy. Gillray's line is knife-sharp, his colour applied with deliberate vulgarity—the acid yellows and fleshly pinks that define London print-shop culture of the 1790s. This tradition of named-figure political caricature, running from Hogarth through Rowlandson and across the Channel to Daumier, supplied the visual grammar—exaggerated bodies, sequential implication, speech packed into images—that comic strips would later inherit wholesale.