Scene from Scott's Kenilworth

George Cruikshank's steel engraving illustrates a passage from Walter Scott's novel *Kenilworth* (1821): a wild-looking figure in animal skins confronts mounted riders—a man in Elizabethan dress and a veiled woman on horseback—before a castellated gatehouse. The composition is theatrical, indebted to the picturesque historical mode rather than overt political satire, yet it belongs squarely in the lineage this exhibition traces. Cruikshank, trained in the shop tradition of Gillray and Rowlandson, brought that school's vigorous line, exaggerated physique, and crowd-pleasing dramatics to book illustration, bridging broadsheet caricature and sequential narrative imagery—the precise cultural hinge from which the comic strip would eventually spring.