Cartoon: The Appearance of Swell astonishes the Surrey Hunt. For Richard Surtees's Jorrock's Jaunts and Jollities.

In British sporting art, no other artist brought humour to the hunting field with anything like the skill of Henry Alken. Very little is known of Alken's early career but it seems probable that Samuel Alken, the sporting painter, was his uncle and may have been responsible for encouraging Henry’s early efforts as an artist and etcher. His parents had fled Denmark in the early 1770s, because of the national unrest, and were living in London at the time of Henry’s birth. Alken's first hunting prints were published in 1813 under his own name but thereafter he used the pseudonym "Ben Tally Ho" until about 1820 when prints bearing his name again began to appear with greater regularity.