The Banqueting Hall, Whitehall, London

Ernest Clifford Peixotto's pen sketch captures a bustling London street scene centered on the historic Banqueting Hall. Horse-drawn carriages and pedestrians animate the foreground, while Big Ben rises in the distance. Peixotto's assured line work and attention to architectural detail exemplify the illustrative tradition that informed early comic strip visual language—the use of perspective, crowd dynamics, and architectural anchoring to establish locale. Such sketches, published in newspapers and magazines, trained readers in sequential visual narrative and spatial coherence, foundational principles that would become central to the comic strip medium emerging in the 1890s.