A framed chromolithographic Spanish political cartoon of the 1880s showing a heavily armed figure walking through a minefield towards the domes and towers of the Moscow Kremlin with a bag of Seville oranges on his hip. A cloud of disembodied demonic heads are ranged in a wintry sky while the word 'Nihilism' is written in smoke across the heavens.

In 1881 Tsar Alexander II had been assassinated in St Petersburg by the Revolutionary Socialist and Nihilist secret society, Zemlya i volya.

 

The restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in Fin de Siglo Spain inaugurated a period of febrile, creative, political and artistic energy.

Politically exiled republicans and radicals contended in the press with Liberal monarchists, ultramontane Catholic absolutists, secretive Carlists and numerous more or less obscure and ephemeral poltical animals.