Rare Rowlandson self-portrait goes on sale

A rare self-portrait by the caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson will be going under the hammer at Bonham’s UK auction house in a few weeks time. The pencil, ink and watercolour sketch shows Rowlandson (on the left) and his friend and fellow artist Henry Wigstead checking their luggage at the office of a coaching company shortly before departing a journey. Rowlandson and Wigstead undertook several excursions together during the course of the 1780s and 90s, visiting France, Wales and various places on the south coast of England. These tours provided an opportunity for the pair to sketch and paint landscapes and topography but inevitably also resulted in the production of humorous sketches reflecting on the experience of travel itself. Many of these ideas would later resurface in the illustrations which Rowlandson produced for the Dr Syntax series from 1809 onward.

The drawing comes from the collection of Major Leonard Dent, DSO, “whose group of 39 works by Rowlandson is still regarded as one of the great collections” of the artist’s work. A set of drawings from the same collection achieved record breaking prices when they were sold in 1984 and that presumably explains why this sketch carries an estimate of £10,000 – £15,000.

The catalogue entry reads as follows:

Thomas Rowlandson (London 1756-1827)
The coach booking office, the artist and Henry Wigstead paying their fares
pencil, pen, ink and watercolour on paper
17.7 x 28.6cm (6 15/16 x 11 1/4in).
Footnotes:
Provenance
The Earl of Mayo
Captain Desmond Coke
His sale, Christie’s, London, 22 November 1929, lot 28 (bt. Sabin, 46 gns)
With Frank T. Sabin, 1936 where acquired by
Major Leonard Dent, in 1939
His sale, Christie’s, London, 10 July 1984, lot 2 (£16,200), where purchased by
With Leger Galleries, London, 1987, where purchased by the present owner

Exhibited
London, Frank T.Sabin, Watercolour Drawings by Thomas Rowlandson, 1933, no. 93, ill.
Reading, Museum and Art Gallery, Thomas Rowlandson: Drawings from Town and Country, 1962, no. 64
London, Richard Green and Frank T.Sabin, Thomas Rowlandson, 1980, no. 2, ill. (loaned by Major Dent)
London, Leger Galleries, English Watercolours, 1984, no. 37
New York, The Frick Collection; Pittsburgh, The Frick Art Museum & Baltimore, Baltimore Museum of Art, The Art of Thomas Rowlandson, 1990, no. 16
London, Lowell Libson Ltd, Beauty and the Beast: a loan exhibition of Rowlandson’s works from British private collections, 2007, no. 31

Literature
H. Faust, ‘A Note on Rowlandson’, Apollo, June 1936, ill.
The Illustrated London News, 12 Sept, 1936, ill. p. 452
F. Gordon Roe, Rowlandson: the Life and Art of a British Genius, 1947, ill, pl. XI
R.R. Wark, Rowlandson’s Drawings for a Tour in a Post Chaise, 1963, p.13 note
L.M.E. Dent, Hillfields: Notes on the Contents, 1972, p. 19
J. Hayes, The Art of Thomas Rowlandson, 1990, pp.58-9
L. Libson, H. Belsey, J. Basket et al, Beauty and the Beast: A loan exhibition of Rowlandson’s works from British private collections, London, 2007, pp. 74-5, ill

Henry Wigstead (c. 1745-1800) was, over a 20 year period, one of Rowlandson’s closest friends as well as being a neighbour in Soho. He had been an executor to the estate of Rowlandson’s aunt whose support had been fundamental to the artist’s development as she financed his attendance of the R.A. schools. Wigstead and Rowlandson made three trips together, the first a 12 day sortie to Hampshire and the Isle of Wight in 1784 which produced around 70 sketches entitled A tour in a post chaise, the majority of which were acquired in the 1920s by Henry E. Huntington. Their format is somewhat smaller than the present drawing. Several of the prints emanating from the trip are said to be ‘after Wigstead’ but they are clearly by a more skilful hand and it is likely that it was Rowlandson who brought to life compositions suggested by his companion. Drawings from the subsequent trips made by the pair to Brighton in 1789 and Wales in 1797 were published in books with text by Wigstead and illustrations by Rowlandson. As the present work is not reproduced in print it has not so far been possible to identify the expedition to which it relates.

Very little is recorded of Rowlandson’s life through documentary evidence so what we do know of him is largely through his artistic output, making the present drawing of particular interest. He is known to have spent time in Paris in his early years and the influence of French artists is particularly evident in this work. He has turned his assured and fluent penmanship to describing a moment during one of the tours when he and Wigstead find themselves in a coach booking office with a yawning postillion and a porter lugging a trunk and an armful of game. He achieves a sense of depth not just with the use of dark foreground washes but by varying the ink used for the outlines, darker in the foreground and paler as the composition recedes. It is first and foremost an anecdotal record of their journey but Rowlandson was nothing if not an acute observer of his fellow men and he adeptly captured the foibles of those he encountered en route. The drawing was once in the collection of Major Leonard Dent, DSO, whose group of 39 works by Rowlandson is still regarded as one of the great collections; it was sold as a single-owner sale in 1984 achieving the highest price for a drawing by Rowlandson ever to be sold at auction (a work now in the Getty Museum, California), a record that still stands today.

Original works by Robert Dighton (1751 – 1814) – The David Padbury Collection goes on sale

 

A large collection of original works by the caricaturist Robert Dighton came up at auction in London earlier this week. All of the items were formerly part of a collection of prints, paintings and drawings by various members of the Dighton family that belonged to a collector named David Padbury. In 2007, Padbury produced a short catalogue raisonné of Dighton’s work to accompany an exhibition at London’s Cartoon Museum. The book, entitled A View of Dighton’s The Dighton Family, Their Times, Caricatures and Portraits is still in print and remains the only detailed study of the artist’s life and work. Most of the items which were being offered up at the sale appeared in Padbury’s book and will therefore be familiar to anyone who’s read it. Nevertheless, I thought it worthy of re-posting the images from the sale catalogue here so that they remain freely accessible online for the foreseeable future.

Dighton occupies a marginal place in the history of eighteenth-century caricature. Most modern print-collectors probably associate him with the mezzotint drolls that were characteristic of Carington Bowles printshop during the 1780s, or else the decidedly less interesting caricature portrait studies that formed the bulk of his output from around 1800 onward. However, he was also a prolific watercolourist and in this medium he undoubtedly excelled. His frenetic paintings of life in the streets around Covent Garden are arguably superior to similar works produced by Thomas Rowlandson (an assertion made by Kenneth Barker in the foreword to Padbury’s book) and the sale of paintings such as these may have accounted for a larger proportion of his income than that which he derived from his prints. The catalogue of known works that appears at the back of Padbury’s book certainly suggests that his output of paintings far exceeded his output of published works during the mid-1790s. He was also a well-known stage actor and singer, performing in such noted venues as Sadler’s Wells Theatre and Vauxhall Gardens and may therefore have regarded the production of caricature engravings as a secondary form of employment.

Robert Dighton was born in London in late 1751. His father was a “paper-hanging-manufacturer” who may also have briefly dabbled in printselling and publishing (Padbury, p. 28). Dighton entered the Royal Academy School in 1770 and came to specialise in portraiture and conversation pieces, his style being heavily indebted to that of Hogarth, Laroon and Hamilton. His first published work appeared in 1776 and by 1781 he was regularly producing images for the printseller Carington Bowles. The connection with the Bowles family lasted until ‘droll’ mezzotints finally fell out of fashion in the late 1790s, by which time Dighton was also regularly self-publishing his own satirical etchings on copper. His work was dominated by social satire of one kind or another, although he briefly strayed into political subjects during the tumultuous years of the early-to-middle 1790s. Most of these prints appear to have been self-published, perhaps indicating that Dighton was making enough money from his theatrical endeavours to cover his own production costs and could therefore dispense with the interference of a publisher. If Dighton’s finances were in rude health in the 1790s then the situation changed rapidly during the first decade of the nineteenth-century. In 1806 he was caught selling drawings by Rembrandt and other Old Masters that he had stolen from the reading rooms of the British Museum. He fled London in disgrace, washing up in Oxford where he scratched out a living engraving caricatures of provincial society figures and noted members of the university faculty. He eventually returned to London in 1810, publishing a small number of prints before apparently becoming increasingly reliant on the work of his sons – Robert Junior and Denis – to support the family. He died at Spring Gardens and was buried at St Martin in the Fields on 13^th June 1814.

Dighton’s background in portraiture means that it is not surprising that that Padbury’s collection contained a large number of caricature portrait studies. Many of these appear to be preparatory works for mezzotints that were published by Carington Bowles during the 1780s and copies of the engraved versions can be easily located using the British Museum’s recently revamped online catalogue.

 

Perhaps the most interesting of the portrait pieces is this signed pencil drawing of a family group done on laid paper with a 1797 watermark (which appears at the top of this article). Padbury notes that the likeness of the man at the centre of the group is similar to that of Dighton’s self-portrait of 1779 and that the lady on the lower right also bears a resemblance to a study of Dighton’s first wife Letitia (d.1778). By 1797, Dighton had been married three times and had at least six children who had lived beyond infancy. It’s therefore possible that this drawing was conceived as an extended family portrait, showing the current members of Dighton’s family alongside the likenesses of his dead wives and children. A second family group – a signed watercolour of parents and a child in a garden which is dated 1811 (right) – was also sold. However, the likelihood is that this is a straight-forwardly commercial piece that Dighton was presumably commissioned to produce for the sitters.

 

Padbury’s collection contained preparatory studies for several of Dighton’s mezzotint ‘drolls’ which are illustrated in order below. The most recognisable of these is the original watercolour version of the Scottish plate from the triptych Geography Bewitched! (1797) but there were also original versions of the prints Intelligence on the Change of Ministry (c.1783), A Master Parson with a Good Living (c.1782-83), Youthful Sport (c.1783 – 84), Quarrelsome Taylors, or Two of a Trade seldom agree (c.1794 – 95) and The Harmony of Courtship / The Dischord of Matrimony (c.1796). There were also a number of watercolours that were either conceived as works in their own right or as preparatory drawings for prints that either weren’t published or for which no surviving copies can be found. These were the two small ovals entitled The Peep Show and A Lady Marketing (c.1780s) and the lively Term Time or the Lawyers Alive in Westminster Hall (c.1795). The latter was the single most expensive item of Padbury’s to appear in the sale and it achieved a final hammer price of £4,500. Finally, at the other end of the income scale, was an early rural landscape entitled The Village Well (c.1780) that fetched just £180. Which I guess goes to show that there’s more money in law than you’re likely to find at the bottom of a wishing well…