Asset number
1613430341
Description
Satire on the progress of the War of Austrian Succession at a point when Maria Theresa and her allies had regained Bohemia from Prussia and France. The queen squats on a wall urinating on a grindstone turned by George II with the sum of £500,000 lettered on the handle while a Dutchman sharpens his sword. A label beside her reads, "Down on her Foes the Floud in vengeance flies,/But all her Friends, Confederates & Allies,/Bless the kind Shower which maks their Courage rise.".The swords of the queen's allies, already sharpened, lie on the ground with labels identifying them as Cologne, Trier, Poland, Mainz, Bohemia and Sardinia. To the right, two French soldiers call for recruits, each has a wooden leg and holds a blank sheet of paper ("carte blanche"): the drummer wearing a tall cap with a fleur-de-lis and a French cock says "Our Army's ruin'd & Silessia lost" while the skin of his drum is lettered, "Deserters come, Or I'm undone"; the trumpeter wearing a cloak decorated with fleur-de-li… (See Merlin record for full description)
© The Trustees of the British Museum
Using this image
Commercial use
To license images for charged-for journals and publications, and other commercial uses, please contact British Museum Images.
Contact BM images
Non-commercial use
You are permitted to use images from the British Museum website subject to our terms of use.
The image will be released to you under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. You can read more about the British Museum and Creative Commons here.
Download this image
New photography
If you cannot see an image that you want on the British Museum website, you can order new photography from us.
Order new image