A hand coloured etching by Isaac Cruikshank. A landau coach, nicknamed a ‘Muddy’ bespattered with grime, halts in Bond street, as two ladies look out of the window to chat with two fashionably dressed gentlemen. The coach driver is protected by a curtained seat, and two tall liveried attendants stand at the rear, eyeing the exchange archly. Before the rise and triumphant progress of Napoleon Bonaparte sparked a patriotic reaction in Britain, the circle of caricaturists and cartoonists working in London took their aim at the perceived voluptuary tendencies of the fashionable establishment in London. The French Wars and the Revolution had led to a period of social and economic hardship in Britain which seemingly left only the wealthy and well-connected untouched. Here Isaac Cruikshank takes aim at the folly and vice of a self-indulgent set. Isaac Cruikshank was the son of a dispossessed Jacobite customs inspector. After leaving Edinburgh for London in 1783 he sustained a precarious existence as an artist and caricaturist and, along with James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, contributed to what has been called ‘the golden age of British caricature’. Isaac Cruikshank died of alcohol poisoning after a winning a drinking contest one evening in 1811. Two of his sons Isaac Robert Cruikshank, and George Cruikshank carried on the family tradition into the middle of the 19th Century.