Triumphal Procession of the hog in armour

Samuel De Wilde

Triumphal procession of the hog in armour

London, S. Tipper for the Satirist, August 1st. 1808

Etching with aquatint

200 x 345 mm

Repairs to old folds

£140

Illustration to ‘A Letter to Sir Richard Phillips Knt’, pp. 1-4. A hog with the head of Phillips and wearing an alderman’s furred gown is carried in procession on a platform formed of a large book, ‘Stranger in Ireland’. This is carried on the shoulders of Phillips’s hack authors: one (well-dressed) holds ‘M.S.S. Travels by the [?] Author’ (probably Sir John Carr), another (in tatters) ‘M.S.S. Stories for the Rising Generation’ (? Tabart). Stockings and birch-rods are held up on poles, as is a (celestial) globe and a placard headed ‘ABC’. A woman carries on her head a basket of ‘Provisions for the Hog’s Feast’ heaped with turnips, carrots, &c. In the foreground two dirty and ragged boys, printer’s devils or apprentices (r.), flourish huge ink-balls (as in BMSat 11359). A ragged boy sells a ballad: ‘The Hog Benighted A new Song’. The procession is accompanied by men flourishing bludgeons and followed by a handsome coach, the coachman and two footmen wearing cocked hats with cockades. In a street in the background (evidently Little Bridge Street, Blackfriars), at r. angles to the procession, is a shop, partly concealed by a large placard: ‘[Month]ly Magazine [Richard Phil]lips’. BM 11081