A feast given by two candidates in an election for parliament; two large tables in a panelled interior (probably intended as a 17th-century inn) surrounded by an assembly of drunken citizens, including a fat and toothless woman who embraces the younger of the candidates, a man with scratches on his face who is losing his wig and lets smoke from his pipe blow into the other candidate's eye, a clergyman who removes his wig to wipe his sweating head, a group of musicians, and a fat man who is being bled by a barber-surgeon to relieve him of the effects of a surfeit of oysters; in the centre foreground, a butcher pours gin on the scalp-wound of a brawler with a banner inscribed "give us our eleven days" (alluding to the revision of the calendar in 1752); to right, the candidates' agent falls backwards having been hit by a brick thrown through the window by one of the crowd demonstrating against the marriage act and the jew bill (both 1753). 1755
etching and engraving. Date: 1755. Dimensions: Height: 425 mm; Width: 548 mm. Medium: paper. Depicted People: Henry Fox, 1st Baron Holland. Collection: British Museum. An Election Entertainment Plate I (BM Cc,2.182 1)
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