Art: Loving Lampoons

Next to his work, which was turning out drawings and watercolors, Thomas Rowlandson liked to drink; and next to drinking, he liked to gamble. It was said of him that he once stood at a gaming table for nearly 36 hours without pausing to eat or sleep. He was apparently never very lucky, but that did not matter.

“I have played the fool,” he would say when all his money was gone, “but here is my resource.” Then he would hold up a pencil—and everyone in the room would know that with that and a box of colors Tom Rowlandson could earn whatever money he needed.

This week Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art opens a lively exhibition called “Rowlandson’s England,” consisting of more than 100 drawings, prints, illustrations and watercolors by Rowlandson and his contemporaries. Though he did not make himself out to be more than a cartoonist and a caricaturist, Rowlandson was in fact an artist who caught the moods and madnesses of his time better than any other. As A. Hyatt Mayor, the Met’s curator of prints, says of the show: “When we try to imagine England in the early 18th century, we see it through Hogarth. When we move on to the age of our Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, we see England through the thousands of prints and watercolors of Thomas Rowlandson.”

A Touch of Banana Peel. Rowlandson first exhibited a drawing when he was only 18, and soon both Sir Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West were praising him. But serious painting on a large scale never suited the Rowlandson temperament. A £7,000 legacy from an aunt gave him a taste for high living, and he wandered through Europe and England, drinking, talking, gambling—and drawing. He illustrated a dozen books including Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield. His work became so popular that a new industry arose in London: producing fake Rowlandsons.

Being so much in demand. Rowlandson often worked too fast for quality. But at his best, his strokes were sure, his delicate palette always in harmony. He drew whores and rakes, rich men with the gout, fortune hunters and repulsive dowagers.

His carriages and coaches capsized or collided, his ships careened drunkenly, his proud hunters tumbled ignominiously from their horses. At times, the humor is rather on the banana-peel level; but for the most part, it has a rare gentleness.

Where a Hogarth would rage, Rowlandson could not help smiling.

A Redeeming Note. His subject was not mankind’s evils but its foibles. The French Barracks, with one officer staring lecherously at the bosom of the girl cutting his toenails while another officer preens before a mirror, is a hilarious lampoon of Gallic lust and vanity. In The Return, Portsmouth Point and The Great Hall (for which Rowlandson farmed out the background, did only the figures), the satirist turned on his native land to poke fun at the rowdiness of the toughs and the smugness of the toffs. But beyond the brawling and posturing lie England’s manicured countryside, its proud fleet and its stately halls—eloquent testimony, lovingly brushed, that the world of Thomas Rowlandson was not inhabited by knaves and fools alone.