Henry Thomas Alken

Henry Thomas Alken (12 October 1785 – 7 April 1851) was an English painter and engraver chiefly known as a caricaturist and illustrator of sporting subjects and coaching scenes.

From about 1816 onwards Alken "produced an unending stream of paintings, drawings and engravings of every type of field and other sporting activity,"[4] and his soft-ground etchings were often colored by hand.

[5] When Alken was 26, he and his young family lived over a shop in Haymarket that belonged to print publisher Thomas McLean of the "Repository of Wit and Humour.

[6] His earliest productions were published anonymously under the signature of "Ben Tallyho", but in 1816 he issued The Beauties & Defects in the Figure of the Horse comparatively delineated under his own name.

[7] Alken provided the plates picturing hunting, coaching, racing and steeplechasing for The National Sports of Great Britain (London, 1821).

[5] In many of his etchings, Alken explored the comic side of riding and satirized the foibles of aristocrats, much in the tradition of other early 19th century omthe oldest of the great foxhound packs in Leicestershire.