The Prince of Whales, or the Fisherman at Anchor

George Cruikshank's hand-coloured etching lampoons the Prince Regent (later George IV) as a vast, bloated whale bearing his own jowled face, twin jets arcing from its blowhole labelled the liquor of oblivion and the dew of favour — shorthand for his cynical abandonment of his Whig allies and his subsequent patronage of Tory ministers. Mermaids, courtiers, and grasping figures scramble in the spray; a bearded fisherman anchors the right edge, presiding over the bounty. The caricature belongs squarely to the Gillray tradition of grotesque physiognomical exaggeration, in which monarchs and ministers were rendered as animals or monsters without apology. Class contempt is embedded in every detail: the Regent's bulk reads as moral as well as physical excess. Cruikshank's bold line and vivid aquatint wash — distributed as a single broadsheet print — form a direct visual ancestor of the sequential comic strip: one compressed image carrying an entire political argument.