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3. Thomas Rowlandson
Kenneth G. Hay
Professor Emeritus of Contemporary Art
Practice, The University of Leeds, UK
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Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827)
• Born in London, son of an impoverished
weaver.
• 1759 Moved to North Yorkshire to stay
with his aunt and uncle who lodged him
and paid for him to study in London at the
Barvis School then quite a famous
Academy.
• Began drawing cartoons at school
• 1772 Spent two year in Paris studying
drawing.
• Studied at the Royal Academy on his return
• Inherited £7000.00 on the death of his aunt
and spent most of it on pleasures and
gambling
• 1809 Started drawing cartoons
professionally, producing many volumes of
cartoons and satires.
• Died 1827, in London, , aged 72.
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Thomas Gainsborough: Georgina,
Duchess of Devonshire 1783
• Legend has it that the
portrait was stolen by
Adam Worth and that
he slept with it under
his mattress for 20
years.
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Thomas Gainsborough(1727-88), “Queen
Charlotte” 1872
• There were widespread
concerns about the Germanborn
Queen Charlotte’s
influence during the King’s
illness.
• Dennis O’Bryen’s pamphlet
criticised her and William Pitt
for trying to exert influence
over the Prince Regent (a
follower and friend of Fox and
the Whig interest)
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A Little Tighter (1791)
• Published by Samuel Fores, 18
May 1791
• Etching with hand colouring,
39.1 x 31.2 cm
• Rowlandson mocks the
ridiculousness of the enormous
lady trying to squeeze herself
into a tight corset with the help
of a beleaguered tailor half her
size who strains under the
effort.
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Anything will do for an Officer
• Watercolour, 1759, 19.7 x 16.1cm
• The diminutive officer, dwarfed by
his sabre stands in front of a
cannon. Probably a caricature of a
French office, ridiculed by the
Times as, “a set of rogues and
plunderers”.(1798).
• A print of this watercolour was
published by Samuel Forbes in
1796 with a text which alludes to a
bunch of schoolboys playing at
soldiers, one of whom was so
misshapen and small that the only
option was to make him an officer..
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Rachael Pringle of Barbadoes
• Published by William Holland, 1796.
• Etching and Aquatint with hand colouring, 56 x 44.2
cm
• Rachael Pringle-Polgreen was the daughter of a
dissolute Scottish schoolmaster and an enslaved
African woman who together ran a shop in
Bridgetown Jamaica. Her father’s name was Lauder,
but she took her name from Thomas Pringle, an
officer who purchased her from her violent father and
set her free. She subsequently came under the
protection of a man called Polgreen, whose name she
also took.. By the early 1780s she had become one of
the most successful women in Bridgetown, running a
tavern.hotel which hosted locals and travellers,
including possibly Prince William (George III’s son
later King William IV).
• Produced five years after her death, it is clear that
Rowlandson did not intend this print to be satirical. It
is rather a portrait print, of interest to the British
market, interested in her story and appearance.
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High Spirits (c.1800)
• Pen with brown ink and
watercolour washes, 22 x 18 cm
• Rowlandson often depicted
drunks. ‘High Spirits’ is from a
series of dishevelled, somewhat
depressed looking women. The
date is difficult to ascertain
except for an inscription on the
reverse to Thomas Tegg in
1804 suggesting it was an old
drawing sent to him some time
after its creation.
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The Unwelcome Visitor (c.1800)
• Pen and ink with watercolour over
pencil, 25,7 x 19.5 cm
• The woman, clearly pregnant,
looks at the shocked man with the
air of a fait accompli. His panic and
discomfort are evident.
• The addition of the man behind the
door, invisible to the couple but
seen by the viewer, raising his
finger to his nose, to suggest that
the father of the babe is not the old
man to whom the girl is
presumably attached.
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Dr Convex & Lady Concave
• Published by Rudolph Ackerman,
20 November 1802. Etching with
hand colouring, 25.2 x 20 cm
• A gentle satire on the discrepancies
of appearance and status in a
couple.
• The figures draw together in
complicity.
• The quotation is from Fulke
Greville, an Elizabethan courtier
and provides justification in the
viewer’s amusement with the
figures’ appearance.
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The Pillar of Salt
• Published by Rowlandson in the Adelphi, 11 April
1805.
• Etching with hand colouring 42.3 x 31.2 cm
• William Pitt resigned from government in
February 1801 after failing to secure Catholic
emancipation.
• In 1804 he returned to politics, forming an alliance
with Henry Addington whom he had previously
attacked.
• But his position, and health were failing.
• He tried to secure an alliance with Russia to ward
of the threat of Napoleon but failed to get the
support of the King or Parliament.
• Rowlandson shows Pitt as a pillar of salt on a
plinth of Obstinacy, melting under the rays of a
royal crown.
• His rivals Fox and Sheridan predict that he won’t
last long and lacks ‘attic salt’ (wit).
• Pitt had been described as obstinate by the King,
and had previously increased the tax on salt. He
died, worn out by pressures of office on the 23
January 1806.
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A New Cock Wanted. Or work
for the plumber
• Published by Thomas Tegg
Cheapside 20 April 1810. 35 x
25 cm
• A young lover abandoned for a
new. A handsome plumber has
come to fix an old tap - dating
from the reign of George II.
• The mistress of the house is
clearly flirting with him
• The older husband raises his
hand to his head, making the
sign of the cuckold, and the dog
behind him yowls for his old
master.
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John Bull at the Italian Opera
• Published by Thomas Rowlandson, 2
October 1811, Etching and hand
colouring, 35.2 x 24.9 cm
• The print plays on the infectious
character of yawning. An Italian opera
singer with his mouth open has set a
number of those in their boxes to yawn.
The orchestra plays grimly on.
• John Bull clenches his fists in the top
box, determined to enjoy himself.
• In the 18th-century, Italian opera was
the preserve of the élite, but also the
object of xenophobic disdain. The
Times described the audience of such
spectacles as “dupes to foreign
imposition.’
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Dutch Night-Mare, or the fraternal hug
returned with a Dutch Squeeze
• Published by Rudolph Ackermann, 29
November, 1813. Etching with hand
colouring, 35.6 x 25.6 cm
• Like the ‘Covent Garden Nightmare’, the
print parodies Fuseli’s “Nightmare”.
• Napoleon,, grimacing in a state bed
decorated with the French fleur-de-lys, his
hat and sword on the bedside stool, is being
squashed by a Dutchman sitting on his
chest., declaring “Orange Boven” (Orange
on top) a popular slogan referring to the
House of Orange. The Netherlands had
been controlled by Napoleon since 1806
through his brother Louis Bonaparte, and
then in 1810, directly. In 1813, the French
withdrew in the wake of their defeat at the
battle of Leipzig, thus freeing the
Netherlands from French rule.
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A Midnight Conversation ( c.1780)
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William Hogarth: “The Rake’s Progress” (1735), etching and engraving, plate three
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A couple of years after his death, the Edinburgh Literary Journal noted
with approval:
“Cruikshank forces us to laugh in spite of ourselves: Rowlandson mingles
insurrection with his merriment, and shows us why we laugh.”