TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/021990/0219400.000

Text File | 1992-08-31 | 5.6 KB | 106 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 96

The Pursuits of Pleasure

Thomas Rowlandson's satirical view of Georgian society

By ROBERT HUGHES


    "He has covered with his never-flagging pencil enough of
charta pura [white paper] to placard the whole walls of China,
and etched as much copper as would sheathe the British Navy." So
ran one obituary for Thomas Rowlandson when he died in 1827 at
the age of 70. It was not far off. This recorder of the life of
Georgian and Regency England left a prodigious number of
watercolors, drawings and prints behind him -- perhaps 10,000,
though nobody has ever counted them up -- and there is no
catalogue raisonne of his work.

    The idea of a "complete" Rowlandson retrospective is
therefore unthinkable. But the Frick Collection in New York City
last week mounted a more modest exhibit: some 80 drawings and
watercolors, curated by art historian John Hayes, that will be
seen through April 8 and in Pittsburgh and Baltimore later this
year. The show samples without fatigue the best of Rowlandson's
work and includes several of his real masterpieces, notably
Vauxhall Gardens, 1784, that charivari of Georgian London in
pursuit of pleasure: fops, soldiers, beggars, rowdies, beauties,
literary celebrities, the high and the low jostling and quizzing
one another, each fresh, distinct and full of life.

    William Hogarth invented the panorama of social class as a
subject in English painting. Rowlandson, who was eight when
Hogarth died, continued the tradition, with an equal gusto but
greater humor. The dark side of Hogarth, his capacity for moral
rage, is largely missing in Rowlandson, and his interest in art
theory is entirely absent. The biggest difference of all was
that Rowlandson had none of Hogarth's ambition for major
categories of art, not just history painting, but oil painting
itself. He was perfectly content with pen and watercolor. But
his mastery of them was complete, and it shows everywhere: in
the supple energy of his line, in the feathery offhand signs for
foliage and clouds, in the unerring grasp of tone that enabled
him to particularize those dense, rowdy friezes of people so
coherently against the pale buildings and landscapes.

    Rowlandson's energy is infectious. It fairly seethes in
images like A Gaming Table at Devonshire House, 1791, where two
of the wild aristocratic beauties of the day -- Georgiana,
Duchess of Devonshire, and her sister Lady Bessborough --
preside like maenads over the eddy of faces, dicing table and
money, and a lecherous buck offers a woman a purse which, none
too subtly, is shaped like a pair of testicles.

    One thinks of Rowlandson as purely English, because of his
devotion to the En glish scene and his delight in guying the
manners and affectations of the French. But he was unusually
well traveled. In a day when tourism was an arduous and
expensive business, confined mainly to the rich, he made several
visits to France (in the 1780s), toured Holland and Germany, and
seems to have been to Rome and Florence. His final trip to Paris
was in 1814, when he went to see the enormous collection of
paintings and sculptures that Napoleon had brought back as war
plunder for the Louvre. What he saw comes out in his work, in
an unpretentious and conversational way, in the poses of figures
quoted from all manner of old masters and antique statuary. It
even pervades the many pornographic drawings he did to stimulate
the jaded appetites of the Prince Regent, which are not included
at the Frick.

    But beyond this, Rowlandson absorbed -- and anglicized -- a
general style: he was a rococo artist, though this is partly
hidden by his love of satire (never a rococo trait). He
constructed his designs from whiplash lines and curvilinear
rhythms. He was devoted to Rubens, preserving on a tiny scale
the rush and tumble and fullness (if not the grand muscular
articulation) of that master's paintings. British critic
Sacheverell Sitwell was right to compare Rowlandson's sketch of
guests floundering, bare-bottomed and head over heels, down the
staircase at a "crush" at Somerset House to Rubens' Last
Judgment in Munich.

    Despite its seeming modesty of size and intention,
Rowlandson's work found echoes in Europe. Particularly so in the
efforts of Goya, who sometimes drew on English satirical prints
as sources for his own graphic work. One can detect more than
a few appropriations of Rowlandson in the Caprichos. And one of
Goya's scariest images, They Preen Themselves -- one demon
giving another a pedicure -- seems to come from Rowlandson's
group of a woman cutting an officer's toenail in The French
Barracks, 1786, though how Goya actually got to see this
particular Rowlandson is a mystery.

    Artists have favorite tropes, metaphors to which they
resort semiconsciously over and over again. Rowlandson's chief
one was the opposition between youth and age, freshness and
decay, virility and impotence. He was not in any real sense a
political artist -- unlike his colleague James Gillray. Beneath
Rowlandson's comedy there was a clawing, nagging fear of falling
apart. As well there should have been, the censorious might add:
he was a rake, too fond of cards, women and the bottle for his
own good. And his work is full of Dreadful Elders, gouty, poxed,
many-chinned, snouted, toothless, cunning, gross and mangy,
peering with lust and censure at the beautiful juicy young, who
mainly ignore them. This, he keeps saying, is what you will come
to. He is saying it to the viewer, of course, but most
insistently to himself.