A central member of the ‘decadent’ artistic world of 1890s London, which included Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm was the outstanding caricaturist of his age. He drew a large number of caricatures of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, generally depicting him as a bluff philistine and compulsive womaniser. In this drawing the Prince is shown as a fashionable, rather sybaritic young man of the 1860s; the death in 1861 of his father, Prince Albert, had freed the Prince from severe moral restrictions.