Four prints of an election: canvassing for votes.

In this second print in the series Four Prints of an Election, individualised groups in the foreground are set against a central band of action which fadroes backwards. The eye is drawn down the incident-packed street to a sunlit village on a green hill.

Both parties have taken over local inns. The Tories have settled into the 'Royal Oak' (hiding place of the Stuart Charles) and their rivals into the Hanoverian 'Crown' farther down the road. Levies on wine and tobacco were often collected at pubs and an anti-government excise riot rages outside this one. Hogarth suggests the man hacking the crossbar of the in sign is going to be brought down himself if he makes the Whig Crown fall.

Centre stage, a bright farmer takes bribes and dinner invitations simultaneously from the Whig waiter and the Tory innkeeper. Two men already eating free dinners watch from the window as the Tory agent leers up at women on the balcony, offering them trinkets from the Jewish pedlar (although he attacks the Jew Bill he has no qualms about doing deals with Jews that will further his own cause). Across the street, outside the shabbier 'Portobello', a cobbler with a heap of boots sits with his wig askew sucking on his pipe. He is listening to a skinny barber who has left his basin and towel on the ground and is grasping a huge quart pot, earnestly demonstrating with bits of broken pipe exactly how Admiral Vernon - with only six ships - won his famous victory of 1739. These two alehouse politicians are balanced on the opposite side by the lion chomping on a fleut-de-lys: a figurehead from a proud British ship now fixed to an inn door, where a landlady counts her takings under the eyes of a lurking grenadier.

In the foreground, a kneeling porter has two packages, one labelled 'By your votes and interest' and the other 'Punchs Theatre Royal Oak Yard'. The farmer's parodic Choice of Hercules in the centre of this scene takes place beneath a showcloth which announces that Mr Punch (a familiar image of Whig corruption since Walpole's days) will appear as 'Candidate for Guzzletown'. In the bottom half of the cloth he is flinging coins to the voters; above him is a picture of the Treasury spewing cold, and the Horse Guards with the royal coach stuck in its inadequate gateway.

See: Jenny Uglow, Hogarth: A Life, A World (London, 1997).