The View and Humours of Billingsgate

This is a satirical but topographically accurate view of the quayside at Billingsgate with the fish market in the foreground. It formed part of a series by the artist called “Ye Wonders of the Deep” which is inscribed below the image together with “often attempted and never performed but by Arnold Van Haecken”. We see a chaotic scene in which a figure identified as a quack doctor by his chest of potions rides into bystanders oblivious of the damage he is causing; dogs in the middle of the engraving trip up fishsellers; a man attaches a fish to the back of a wig of a figure sampling an oyster on the left.

Billingsgate was notorious for the bad language employed by the fishmongers and fishwives, one of whom is prominently positioned in the centre of the image with a large basket on his shoulders. The engraving is accompanied with four columns of verse which contrast Billingsgate’s present in 1736 with its imagined courtly and refined past.