ROWLANDSON THE CARICATURIST

FIRST VOLUME

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LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET

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ROWLANDSON THE CARICATURIST

A SELECTION FROM HIS WORKS

WITH ANECDOTAL DESCRIPTIONS OF HIS FAMOUS CARICATURES

AND

A Sketch of his Life, Times, and Contemporaries

BY
JOSEPH GREGO
AUTHOR OF 'JAMES GILLRAY, THE CARICATURIST; HIS LIFE, WORKS, AND TIMES'

WITH ABOUT FOUR HUNDRED ILLUSTRATIONS

IN TWO VOLUMES—VOL. I.

London

CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1880

[The right of translation is reserved]

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DEDICATED

TO

ALL LOVERS OF HUMOUR

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PREFACE.

The Editor recognises that the admirers of Rowlandson's peculiar graphic productions, and those fortunate amateurs who are able to indulge their taste for collecting caricatures and works embellished with humorous illustrations, will not expect any excuse for the preparation and appearance of the present work: he anticipates that—in spite of much that he would improve—the two volumes devoted to a résumé of the great Caricaturist, with the multifarious, ludicrous, and grotesque creations which emanated from his fertile fancy, will be accepted as, in some degree, supplying that which, without being absolutely indispensable, has frequently been instanced as a compilation likely to be acceptable to the appreciators of graphic and literal satire.

To the initiated few this sketch of a famous delineator of whimsicalities, with the review of his works, times, and contemporaries, is offered with the conviction that the intentions of the Author are not liable to be misconstrued by them; nor has he any grounds to dread that the subjects represented run the risk of being questioned at their hands on the grounds of propriety.

Fuller consideration is due to the many to whom the name of Rowlandson conveys no more than a perception of 'oddity' or of license of treatment which approaches vulgarity, to whom the innumerable inventions of the artist represent foreign ground—a novel, strange land, populated with daring absurdities, according to their theories.

It is felt that some justification is needed for the writer's temerity in volunteering as a pioneer to conduct the unsophisticated through the devious and eccentric intricacies which characterise the progress of pictorial satire, as demonstrated in the subject of the work now submitted to the public with all due deference.

The neophyte, it is anticipated, will be somewhat startled at the first glance of the surroundings amidst which he will wander; but it is believed that, in the course of his journey through an anomalous past, he will alight on discoveries, more or less interesting in themselves, which provide abundant food for the student of humanity.

The writer deprecates a hasty conclusion, with the assurance that those who have the moderation to reserve their opinions until they have fully acquainted themselves with the materials, may possibly suffer their critical instincts to be modified in the process.

We have taken the liberty of scrutinising somewhat closely—with a view to the portrayal of its salient features—a generation which was marked with a colouring more intensified than those who live in our time are prepared to adopt. Of this age, diversified with much which has been discarded, we accept Rowlandson as the fitting exponent. His works epitomise a state of being comparatively recent in actual fact, but, from the circumstances of change, so distantly removed in appearance, as to constitute a curious experience to the majority.

With every qualification to ensure success, Rowlandson, as his story indicates, deliberately threw away the serious chances of life, to settle down as the delineator of the transitory impressions of the hour. 'There is wisdom in laughter,' says the sage; and—without precisely regarding life as a 'stale jest'—our artist drew mirth from every situation, and illustrated from his own fecund resources that, while nearly every circumstance has its grotesque as well as its sinister aspect, the ludicrous elements of any given event are often more enduring than the serious ones.

Good-natured pleasantry, we may remind the reader, is held to be wholesome. Rowlandson's shafts, so far as our judgment serves, were never pointed with gall: while he possessed the faculty of seizing the weak or ridiculous side of his subject, he seems, unlike Gillray, his best-known contemporary, to have been an utter stranger to acrimonious instigations. A fuller acquaintanceship reveals the Caricaturist—as he was described in his day—'an inexhaustible folio of amusement, every page of which was replete with fun'—perhaps the most genial travelling companion who could be selected in traversing the ways of life led by our ancestors, for the half-century which witnessed the gradual extinction of the quaint, old-fashioned Georgian era, and inaugurated the less picturesque generation to which our immediate predecessors belong.

Be it recorded, concerning the part played in the world by the satirists, pictorial and literal—'the less they deserve, the more merit in your bounty.' We would modestly suggest the sapient axiom embodied by the great master, 'Fancy's favourite child,' relative to the transient jesters whose lot it has been 'to hold, as't were, the mirror up to nature' upon the mimic stage: 'Let them be well used; for they are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time: after your death you were better have a bad epitaph, than their ill report while you live.'

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CONTENTS
OF
THE FIRST VOLUME.

painter of marine subjects—George Cruikshank's estimation of Thomas Rowlandson—General review of Rowlandson's caricatures: Gambling, the Westminster Election, 1784; political struggles between the Whigs and Tories, Pitt and Fox, the King and the Prince, fashions, the clergy, the Bar, usures, doctors, quackery, John Bull, foreigners, cockneys, countrymen, the Universities, collegians, the military, the navy, seaport sketches, amusements of the bon-ton, Vauxhall, the Opera, theatres, card-playing, sharpers, drinking, feasting, sport, fox-hunting, horse-racing, prize-fighting, rural sports, masquerading, picnic revels, fortune-hunters, elopements, Gretna Green, travesties, parodies, and burlesques, trials, scandals, housebreaking, highway robberies, the passions, the Royal Family—Imitations of the old masters: Female studies, croquis taken in France, Holland, Belgium, Germany, England and Wales, the metropolis—The Regency struggle—Admiral Lord Nelson—The miseries of human life—The Great French Revolution—Napoleon Buonaparte—The Delicate Investigation—The Royal Academy, &c., &c.—Manifold production of drawings—Contributions to book illustration—Portraits of the caricaturist—The artist and his relatives—His schoolfellows—A student in Paris—At the Academy schools—His early friends Bannister and Angelo—Tricks on the Royal Academicians—His friends Pyne and John Thomas Smith—Studies of Continental character—Between London and Paris—Is left a fortune—His passion for the gambling-table—The integrity of his conduct—Successive exhibits at the Royal Academy—Portraits in oil—His travels at home and abroad; the companions of his excursions; Mitchell the banker and Henry Wigstead the magistrate—Congenial spirits—Vauxhall Gardens—Lord Barrymore—Nocturnal frolics—Play—Successive drawings of social satires, contributed to the Royal Academy Exhibitions—Rowlandson robbed—Identifies a thief—Lord Howe's victory—French prisoners—Sketches of the embarkation of the expedition for La Vendée—Sojourns in Paris with Angelo, John Raphael Smith, Westmacott, and Chasemore—Sketching in the Netherlands and Germany with Mitchell—John Bull on his travels—Night auctions of pictures, drawings, and prints—Old Parsons, 'Antiquity' Smith, Edwin, Greenwood, Hutchins, Heywood—Relaxations of the period—Nights at Mitchell's—Wigstead and 'Peter Pindar'—Wolcot's stories—Dinners with Weltjé at Hammersmith—The Prince of Wales—Theatrical worthies, Munden, Palmer and Madame Banti—Convivialities—The Prince's Maître d'Hôtel: his cooking and anecdotes—Excursions in England: views in Cumberland, Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Norfolk, Suffolk, Kent, Hampshire, &c.—Studies in the Universities: views of the Colleges of Oxford and Cambridge—Malcolm's 'Historical Sketch of the Art of Caricaturing'—Wright's 'History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art'—Rowlandson as an etcher of the works of amateur caricaturists: his own spirit lent to the productions of Wigstead, Nixon, Woodward, Bunbury, Collings, &c.—Sketches of contemporary caricaturists: William Henry Bunbury, George Moutard Woodward, Henry Wigstead, the facetious John Nixon—The Beef-steak Club—The 'well-bread man'—Collings, artist and editor of the 'Public Ledger'—Caleb Whiteford—'Ephraim Hardcastle'—James Heath—George Morland—James Gillray—Allusions to Rowlandson in the 'Life of James Gillray, the Caricaturist, with the Story of his Works and Times'—The position of caricaturists in relation to their contemporaries—Henry Angelo, the fencing master—Personal characteristics of satirists—Rowlandson's publisher, Rudolph Ackermann: sketch of his life—Conversazioni at the 'Repository of Arts'—Special qualities of Rowlandson's productions—Esteem in which he was held by contemporaries—His death and funeral 1 1774–1781.
A Rotation Office—The Village Doctor— A Scene at Streatham—Bozzy and Piozzi—Special Pleading—The Power of Reflection—E O, or the Fashionable Vowels—Gambling Tables— Charity Covereth a Multitude of Sins—Bob Derry—Luxury—Political and social caricatures for 1781 96 1782–1783. Amputation—The Rhedarium—The Discovery— Interior of a Clockmaker's Shop—The Times—Political and social caricatures for 1783 107 1784.
POLITICAL CARICATURES. The Pit of Acheron—The Fall of Dagon—The Coalition—Fox and North Ministries—Britannia Roused—The East India Company—The Apostate Jack Robinson—The Champion of the People—Master Billy's Procession to Grocers' Hall—The State Auction—The Westminster Election—The Hanoverian Horse and the British Lion—The Canvass—The Rival Duchesses—The Rival Candidates: Hon. Charles James Fox, Lord Hood,

Sir Cecil Gray—The Devonshire, or most Approved Manner of Securing Votes—The Poll—Fox, the Westminster Watchman—Honest Sam House—Lords of the Bedchamber—The Court Canvass of Madame Blubber—Wit's Last Stake, or the Cobbling Voter and Abject Canvassers—Monsieur Reynard—The Case is Altered—The Hustings—Procession of the Hustings after a Successful Canvass—Lord Lonsdale—The Westminster Mendicant—The Westminster Deserter Drumm'd out of the Regiment—Court Influence—Preceptor and Pupil—Secret Influences Directing the New Parliament—For the Benefit of the Champion—The Petitioning Candidate—Christopher Atkinson, a 'Rogue in Grain'—John Stockdale, the 'Bookselling Blacksmith' 111 SOCIAL CARICATURES. A Sketch from Nature—English Curiosity— Counsellor and Client—La Politesse Françoise—1784, or the Fashions of the Day—The Vicar and Moses—Money-lenders—Bookseller and Author—The Historian Animating the Mind of a Young Painter—Billingsgate—Illustrations of Conveyances—Rowlandson's imitations of modern drawings 145 1785. The Fall of Achilles—The Golden Apple, or the Modern Paris—Defeat of the High and Mighty Balissimo Corbettino and his Famed Cecilian Forces—The Wonderful Pig—The Waterfall—Comfort in the Gout—Vauxhall Gardens: Vauxhall Characters—Vincent Lunardi: Aërostation Out at Elbows, or the Itinerant Aëronaut—Too Many for a Jew—An Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful—The Maiden Speech—Captain Epilogue—Col. Topham Endeavouring with his Squirt to Extinguish the Genius of Holman—Persons and Property Protected by Authority—Intrusion on Study, or the Painter Disturbed—Courtship—Filial Affection, or a Trip to Gretna Green—The Reconciliation, or the Return from Scotland—Lord Eden and Gen. Arnold—Harmony—Sympathy—John Gilpin—Tastes Differ—Nap in the Country—Nap in Town—Sea Amusement, or Commander-in-Chief of Cup and Ball on a Cruise—Opera Boxes 152 1786. Box Lobby Loungers—Love and Learning—Sketch of Politics in Europe, January 1786—Uncle Toby (the Duke of Richmond)—An Ordnance Dream, or Planning Fortifications—Luxury—Misery—The Morning Dram—Count Boruwloski (the Polish Dwarf) Performing before the Grand Seigneur—

href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@45980@[email protected]#BREWERS_DRAYS" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">Brewers' Drays—Youth and Age—Sailors Carousing—A Theatrical Chymist—The Return from Sport—A Box Lobby Hero—Werter—Covent Garden Theatre—Illustrations to the poems of 'Peter Pindar' (Dr. Wolcot)—'Picturesque Beauties of Boswell' 180 1787. Uncle George and Black Dick—Illustration to Peter Pindar's poems, 'The Lousiad,' 'Peter's Pension,' 'Odes for the New Year'—The Triumph of Sentiment—The Triumph of Hypocrisy—Transplanting of Teeth (Baron Ron)—The Village Forge—A Brewer's Dray—A Posting Inn—A Rural Halt—Haymakers—A Sailor's Family—A College Scene, or a Fruitless Attempt on the Purse of Old Squaretoes—Tragedy Spectators—Comedy Spectators—Love in the East—The Art of Scaling—Modish—Prudent—Cribbage Players 199 1788. Hunting Series—The Meet—The Humours of St. Giles's—Warren Hastings—Ague and Fever—Lord Hood—The School for Scandal—The King's Illness—Filial Piety—The Prospect before us—The Regency Struggle—The Restrictions—The Addresses—The Word-Eater—Blue and Buff Loyalty—Housebreakers—Love and Dust—Luxury and Desire—Lust and Avarice—Stage Coach and Basket—An Epicure—A Comfortable Nap in a Post-chaise—A Fencing Match—The Pea-Cart—A Print Sale 223 1789. The Regency Restrictions—The Modern Egbert, or the King of Kings—The Pittfall—The Propagation of a Truth—Loose Principles—State Butchers—A New Speaker—Britannia's Support, or the Conspirators Defeated—Going in State to the House of Peers—A Sweating for Opposition—Irish Ambassadors Extraordinary—Address from the Parliament of Ireland to the Prince of Wales—The Prince's Answer—The King's Recovery—Irish Ambassador's Return—Rochester Address—Grand Procession to St. Paul's on St. George's Day, 1798—Sergeant Kite (Duke of Orleans) Recruiting at Billingsgate—

href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@45980@[email protected]#GROG" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">Grog on Board—Tea on Shore—Interruption, or Inconvenience of a Lodging House—A Sufferer for Decency—The Start—The Betting Post—The Course— The Mount—Bay of Biscay—Chelsea Reach—La Place des Victoires, Paris—A Dull Husband 242 1790. Tythe Pig—A Roadside Inn—Frog-Hunting—A Butcher—Repeal of the Test Act—A French Family—Kick-up at a Hazard Table—Who Tells First for a Crown—Philip Thicknesse—'An Excursion to Brighthelmstone, made in the year 1789'—Saloon at the Pavilion, Brighton—Waiting for Dinner—At Dinner—After Dinner—Preparing for Supper—Four o'clock in Town—Four o'clock in the Country—Fox-Hunters Relaxing—John Nichols—Miniature groups and scenes 268 1791. The Pantheon—The Prospect before us, Nos. 1 and 2—Chaos is Come Again—Sheets of picturesque etchings—The Attack—Bardolph Badgered—An Imperial Stride—The Grand Battle between the Famous English Cock and the Russian Hen—A Little Tighter—A Little Bigger—Damp Sheets—English Barracks—French Barracks—Slugs in a Sawpit—The Prince's jockey, Chiffney—How to Escape Winning—How to Escape Losing—Angelo's Fencing Rooms—Notorious Fencers—The Inn-yard on Fire—A Squall in Hyde Park—Illustrations to Fielding's 'Tom Jones'—Smollett's 'Adventures of Peregrine Pickle'—'Délices de la Grande Bretagne' 283 1792. St. James's and St. Giles's—Work for Doctors' Commons—Six Stages of Marring a Face—Six Stages of Mending a Face—Ruins of the Pantheon—Hogarthian Novelist: 'Adventures of Roderick Random'—Philosophy Run Mad—On her Last Legs—Studious Gluttons—Cold Broth and Calamity—An Italian Family—The Hypochondriac—Benevolence—The Contrast: which is Best? British Liberty, or French Liberty? 306 1793. Reform Advised: Reform Begun: Reform Complete—New Shoes—Illustrations to Smollett's novels—Illustrations to a 'Narrative of the War'—Illustrations to Fielding's novels 319 1794.

class="trsm"> The Grandpapa—The Foreigner Stared out of Countenance—Traffic—The Invasion Scare: Village Cavalry Practising in a Farmyard—A Visit to the Uncle—A Visit to the Aunt—Bad News upon the Stock Exchange 321 1795. Harmony: Effects of Harmony: Discord— A Master of the Ceremonies Introducing a Partner 326 1796. Sir Alan Gardiner—Portraits—An Impartial Narrative of the War 327 1797. Theatrical Candidate—Views in the Netherlands— 'Tiens bien ton Bonnet, et toi, defends ta Queue'—Cupid's Magic Lanthorn 330 1798. The Hunt Dinner—Illustrations to the 'Comforts of Bath,' in twelve plates—'The New Bath Guide, or Memoirs of the Blunderhead Family; in a series of poetical epistles,' by Christopher Anstey—Views of London—The Invasion Panic: Volunteers and Recruiting—The Hungarian and Highland Broadsword Exercise—The Glorious Victory obtained over the French Fleet off the Nile, August 1, 1798, by the gallant Admiral Lord Nelson of the Nile—High Fun for John Bull, or the Republicans put to their Last Shift—The Discovery—'Annals of Horsemanship'—The Academy for Grown Horsemen—'Love in Caricature' 333 1799. Cries of London—A Charm for a Democracy—An Artist Travelling in Wales—Nautical Characters— An Irish howl—Etchings after the old masters—St. Giles's Courtship—St. James's Courtship—Connoisseurs—Horse Accomplishments—Comforts of the City—Procession of a Country Corporation—Forget and Forgive—A Note of Hand—Legerdemain—A Bankrupt Cart, or the Road to Ruin in the East—Subjects engraved after designs by Bunbury—Distress—Hungarian and Highland Broadsword Exercise—Loyal Volunteers of London and the Environs 354

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ROWLANDSON THE CARICATURIST.

Buyers and readers of books, all admirers of pictures, drawings, and engravings—in a word, the intelligent, and, let us hope, larger proportion of the community—are well aware, if they are inclined to search for information in respect to the celebrities of art, or would inquire into the personal careers of the renowned pioneers and practitioners of the serious branches of the profession, of whatever period, school, or nationality, that numerous sources of reference, tolerably easy of access, are open to the seeker without being driven far abroad in his quest.