The Art of Rowlandson
The Watercolor Drawings of Thomas Rowlandson. Introduction Tits volume reproduces, in a way that only the originals could rival, some fifty drawings from the Wiggin Collection in the Boston Public Library, and is a handsome addition to the recent illustrated books on Rowlandson. The whole is a miniature survey of the artist's burly and prolific genius. Some ambitions pieces are included ; the' Watteau-like " Taking a Mean Advantage," or " The Suicide," a study which transcends his usual lack of feeling. Yet they serve to show that Rowlandson will always be at his best among a people tumbling over itself with bonhomie and liquor, with Anglo-Saxon epicures at Brighton or Bath, at Covent Garden or in curly landscapes, among the elementary humours of the wig- shop, among college dons ogling their supper turtle, or with the French camp preparing to dine off horse-flesh. In such settings he preserves an inimitable human situation, one in which the smug hopes of appetite or the genial results of excess are invariably dominant, and here his graphic conventions are at their most brilliant, and as successful in a dashing sketch as in an elaborate essay.
Rowlandson saw the last throes of the grand eighteenth century, blissfully unaware that the age he recorded was swiftly passing. But little escaped him, and if he were their only known interpreter, his times would never be forgotten, and their temper scarcely
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