The Triumph of Quassia

James Gillray's etching lampoons the early nineteenth-century controversy over quassia wood—a cheap bitter additive brewers preferred to taxed hops. A Black female figure sits triumphant atop a barrel marked "True Quassia Free from Taxation," hoisting a foaming tankard while corpulent brewers parade her forward. A noblewoman on horseback receives a basket of quassia chips at right. Gillray's cross-hatched line work, sharp tonal contrasts, and crowded allegorical staging place this squarely in the British print-shop tradition—Hogarth's moral narrative, Rowlandson's bodily excess—that fed directly into sequential comic art.