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| Thomas Rowlandson The Connoisseurs 1799 hand-colored etching Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Thomas Rowlandson The Connoisseurs ca. 1790 watercolor Yale Center for British Art |
"Like many of his fellow artists, Rowlandson continually mocked the foibles of connoisseurs in a variety of ways over the course of his career. Around the time he made this drawing, the eighteenth-century culture of connoisseurship had received a major boost, as art flowed more freely than ever in the wake of the French Revolution. As Archibald Alison put it, echoing earlier authors, the "fine arts are . . . addressed to the imagination, and the pleasures they afford are described . . . as the Pleasures of the Imagination." In this instance three connoisseurs pay a visit to an artist's studio to judge his latest offering: a historical painting of Susanna and the Elders. While the artist gazes at the ceiling in a pose of studied nonchalance, they study his unfinished canvas. But rather than enjoy the pleasures of the imagination, these connoisseurs are content to stop at the pleasures of the flesh. Like latter-day Elders, they lust over the nude Susanna, just as their forebears had in the apocryphal addition to the Book of Daniel."
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| Thomas Rowlandson Mr Michell's Picture Gallery, Grove House, Enfield 1817 watercolor Yale Center for British Art |
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| Thomas Rowlandson British Institution, Pall Mall 1808 hand-colored etching and aquatint Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Thomas Rowlandson Exhibition of the Society of Painters in Watercolour, in Old Bond Street 1808 hand-colored etching and aquatint British Museum |
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| Thomas Rowlandson Viewing at the Royal Academy, Somerset House ca. 1815 watercolor Yale Center for British Art |
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| Thomas Rowlandson Exhibition Stare-Case, Somerset House ca. 1800 watercolor Yale Center for British Art |
"Dr. Johnson thought the acid test of fitness was climbing to the top of the exhibition staircase at Somerset House without stopping. This stairway was designed by Sir William Chambers and led the way to the Great Room, where the Royal Academy held its annual exhibitions. Although the Academy promoted them as "easy and convenient," the stairs became notorious. Owing to their cramped site, Chambers squeezed three continuous flights of stairs into a semicircular space. The unhappy result was a vertiginous staircase, the final flight of which was the steepest and narrowest. While Chambers hoped to make climbing the staircase a metaphor for the ascent to Parnassus, Rowlandson depicts an angry altercation at the top of the stairs and a rampant dog wreaking havoc lower down. To the horror of some onlookers and the delight of others, the ladies trip and tumble headlong down the stairs their skirts flying. The right-hand niche is occupied by a smiling Callipygian Venus, the goddess who admires her own beautiful posterior. By joking about the kind of beauties the exhibition visitors really want to see, Rowlandson also mocks the elevated pretensions of the Academy itself. In this satire, Rowlandson demonstrates the superior appeal of real bodies as opposed to the idealized works of art on view upstairs. Not only does this allude to Hogarth's famous dictum, "who but a bigot, even to the antiques, will say that he has not seen faces and necks, hands and arms in living women that even the Grecian Venus doth but coarsely imitate," but the composition also embodies Hogarth's famously anti-academic "Line of Beauty." Unsurprisingly, some have detected Rowlandson's borrowing from Last Judgment imagery in these chaotic, tumbling figures. Rather than a dignified ascent of Parnassus, as Chambers intended, Rowlandson suggests a comic equivalent of the descent into hell."
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| Thomas Rowlandson Drawing from Life at the Royal Academy, Somerset House 1808 hand-colored etching and aquatint Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Thomas Rowlandson Christie's Auction Rooms 1808 hand-colored etching and aquatint Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Thomas Rowlandson The Historian Animating the Mind of a Young Painter 1784 etching Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Thomas Rowlandson The Chamber of Genius 1806 hand-colored etching Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Thomas Rowlandson The Opera Singers ca. 1790-95 watercolor Yale Center for British Art |
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| Thomas Rowlandson Audience watching a play at Drury Lane Theatre ca. 1785 watercolor Yale Center for British Art |
"Rowlandson's portrayal of an audience at the theater captures the culture of display and spectatorship that lay at the heart of eighteenth-century social life. Few of these spectators have actually come to watch the play. Instead they are busy studying one another and being scrutinized by figures in the surrounding boxes. Because light levels in auditoriums were not dimmed during performances, London's crowded theaters provided an ideal venue for this sport of seeing and being seen. Rowlandson was himself a regular habitué of the playhouse; his friend Jack Bannister was a leading comic actor who regularly performed at Drury Lane. Although this scene has been identified as the remodeled Drury Lane that opened in 1775, the architecture does not quite tally, making this a more generic scene of London theater life. These theatergoers occupy the first gallery level of the auditorium, a zone reserved for the polite middling orders of society. Here young gallants try their luck with the seated ladies. . . . By dispensing with a clear narrative, Rowlandson allows for an endless range of possible plots for this human drama in the theater, something he may have learned from studying French painting on trips to France. Such open-endedness infuses the scene with an erotic charge and invites the viewer to become a fellow gallery lounger, flirting with the surrounding company in a playful exchange of glances."
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| Thomas Rowlandson Actresses' Dressing-room at Drury Lane Theatre ca. 1800-1810 watercolor Yale Center for British Art |
– quoted texts are from curator's notes at the Yale Center for British Art