Thomas Rowlandson
Rowlandson Drawings. Edited and introduced by Adrian Bury. (Avalon Press. 25s.) No artist is in greater need of protection from his friends than Thomas Rowlandson. His output was prodigious, and almost all of it was perfunctory. Necessity drove him into periodical bursts of production, but he had skimped his early training and was conse- quently forced to fall back upon the constant repetition of a few stock ideas. Thus he has an insipid formula for a beautiful woman, a repulsive formula for a lecherous old man, and constructed the greater number of his drawings by the kaleidoscope combination of these with a few other mannerisms. No consistent view of life, such as Gillray's savagery or Hogarth's moralising, is to be found in his work ; or rather, if we search deep enough for one, we are likely to find a diseased love of cruelty and ugliness for their own sake. The man who could make fun of the attempt to heal lunatics humanely, as Rowlandson did in the two drawings of 'Dr. Willis reproduced by Adrian Bury (Plates 22 and 23), was exceptionally coarse-fibred even for his age. And yet the most apparently factory-produced of Rowlandson's drawings arc competed for in auction sales, referred to affectionately as " Rowley's," and treasured in modern collections.
An enumeration of drawings in which Rowlandson was something
better than a hack would soon be exhausted. " Box Lobby Loungers," " Vauxhall Gardens," " King George III and Queen Charlotte driving through the Broadway, Deptford," "Exhibition Starecase," " Spring Gardens "—these and a few others would com- plete the tale of drawings in which Rowlandson was suffiziently unhurried to look with fresh vision at the contemporary scene and to do justice to his innate capabilities for lively line :.:td skilful com. position.
It has not been part of Mr. Adrian Bury's task in editing 'hi; book to wield the knacker's knife with extreme ruthlessness but, in contrast to some recent effusions on Rowlandson, he writes with commendable restraint about him. Apart from the few drawing; of whose merit there need be no dispute he seems, if the tenor of the notes on the eighty-two collotype plates is any guide, to base his claims for his selection on its interest as a record of the social history of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. That is acceptable ground, though it would be unwise without further died to place too much faith on the accuracy to detail of an artist who dfd not look closely at it. But, even if his accuracy is vindicated, we must not mistake a journalist's clichés for an artist's style; Pierce Egan is not comparable with Dickens.
GRA, I AM REYNOLDS.
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