Gillray (James). The Death of the Great Wolf..., H. Humphrey, Dec 17th 1795

Gillray (James). The Death of the Great Wolf..., H. Humphrey, Dec 17th 1795, etching with aquatint on laid, bright contemporary hand-colouring, trimmed to the plate mark on the lower margin, slight adhesion scaring to the verso, 330 x 445 mm (Quantity: 1) BM Satires 8704. Gillray's caricature of the Tory administration and their supporters is a parody of Benjamin West's The Death of Wolfe of 1771, which commemorated the 1759 Siege of Quebec. The cartoon mocks the government's overreaction to domestic radical agitation in light of the revolutionary events in France. The heavy ministerial forces in the background are disproportionate to the small number of unarmed sans-culottes visible to the far left. In the foreground, the mortally wounded Prime Minister, William Pitt is supported by the conservative political writer Edmund Burke and the Secretary of State for War Henry Dundas. Instead of staunching the wound, Dundas offers Pitt a glass of port - one of Pitt's well-known weaknesses - and in the place of the Mohawk Indian of West's original sits a near-naked Baron Loughborough, the Lord Chancellor, with the purse of the Great Seal and a monstrous wig of office replacing the Mohawk's beaded bag and headdress.