A swarm of English bees
A description of the costly and curious military carriage of the late Emperor of France: taken on the evening of the battle of Waterloo; with its superb and curious contents, as purchased by government, and now exhibiting (by permission) at the London Museum, Piccadilly; with the circumstances of the capture, accurately described by Major Baron von Keller, by whom it was taken and brought to England
Revised edition, London: printed for William Bullock, 1818
8460.d.165(2), plate tipped in
The boisterous behaviour of the visitors to the London Museum was depicted by two of the leading satirical artists of the day. Thomas Rowlandson’s ‘Exhibition at Bullock’s Museum of Boneparte’s carriage taken at Waterloo’ and George Cruikshank’s ‘A swarm of English bees hiving in the Imperial carriage!!’, both published as hand-coloured etchings in January 1816 by Rudolph Ackermann and Hannah Humphrey respectively, show disorderly visitors climbing over and inside the carriage. This cutting of a reproduction of the Cruikshank print, apparently from a late nineteenth or early twentieth-century monthly periodical, was tipped into the University Library’s copy of the 1818 edition of Bullock’s pamphlet by a previous owner, and testifies to the continuing interest in the carriage decades after its capture.