Robert Price Indulging His Favorite Scene

A hand-colored etching — Isaac Cruikshank's sharp, crowded line-work inked with acid then manually tinted — depicts a chaotic bedchamber: ruffians tear apart a canopied royal bed while a crowned demon rides the back of a kneeling figure (Price) who peers voyeuristically through a hole at the carnage. A woman flees at right; skulls litter the floor. The title *The Doctor Indulged with his Favorite Scene* targets Richard Price, the Dissenting minister whose 1789 sermon praising the French Revolution had already drawn Edmund Burke's fury in *Reflections on the Revolution in France*. Cruikshank renders Price as both peeping Tom and devil's stooge, the crown he kneels on signaling his contempt for monarchy. Such partisan caricature — dense with symbolic props, speech scrolls, and grotesque physiognomy — descends directly from Hogarth's moralizing prints and Gillray's political venom, and feeds forward into the sequential visual storytelling that would eventually produce the comic strip.