Junction of Parties

James Gillray's etching lampoons the notorious Fox–North Coalition of 1783, in which longtime enemies Charles James Fox and Lord North joined forces to topple William Pitt's ministry—a union widely denounced as cynical and corrupt. Gillray renders both men as grotesquely bloated figures, trousers dropped, defecating into a cauldron bearing the Royal Arms while a winged devil stirs the foul mixture between them. The banner overhead reads *Cataplasma Belli et Pacis, vel Coalitio Infernalis*—a hellish political poultice. Gillray's sharp intaglio line and his use of bodily disgust as political argument sit at the direct origin of the comic strip's visual grammar of exaggeration, sequence, and symbolic imagery.