Acts of Adhesion: Louis XVIII Receives His Marshals

A rotund Louis XVIII enthroned in pink velvet receives a procession of Napoleonic marshals, each bowing with exaggerated servility as speech bubbles balloon overhead. Cruikshank's etched line — sharp, crowded, every face a grotesque — sits squarely in the Gillray tradition of physiognomic ridicule: the marshals are rendered as time-servers trading one master for another, their dignity dissolved by the caption's pun, *Acts of Adhesion*. Class and national caricature operate freely here; foreign figures are typed by costume and exaggerated feature in the period's conventional visual shorthand. This is the direct ancestor of the comic strip: sequential implied narrative, speech bubbles, panel-filling crowd composition. British print satire — Hogarth's moral series, Gillray's political savagery, Rowlandson's social comedy — gave the nineteenth century its grammar of sequential graphic storytelling.