Thomas Rowlandson, Grog on Board, ink and watercolour

This seems like a fitting image to take us into the weekend. An original ink and watercolour wash by Thomas Rowlandson, whose signature appears at the bottom left-hand corner of the paper. It measures approximately 11.5 x 15 inches.

The image was originally engraved for the publisher S.W. Fores, who issued it under the title Grog on Board in January 1789. It was originally accompanied by a companion piece titled Tea on Shore, in which the raucous debauchery of the sailors is compared with a polite society gathering.

I suspect that this is a later version, drawn after the engraving was issued and possibly dating to the 1800s – 1810s, when the publisher Rudolph Ackermann began selling traced copies of the artist’s original works. It looks a bit too similar to the engraving to have been an original sketch that was produced off the cuff. The tone and application of the colouring also appears different (at least to my eye) than the thin washes of delicate colour that Rowlandson usually applied to his watercolours.

This picture is due to come up at auction in a couple of weeks. It carries an estimate of £600 – £800. Personally, I can’t quite make up my mind about it. It may be a genuine original, or a ‘licensed copy’ of the kind Ackermann is known to have produced. Alternatively, it could simply be a contemporary amateur copy which has subsequently been passed off as an original?

Perhaps something to mull over as I prepare to sail off into the weekend with a healthy cargo of grog on board.

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A collection of original works by Thomas Rowlandson

There’s a veritable flood tide of original works by Thomas Rowlandson coming up for auction in the UK at the moment. These include genre scenes, character studies and a few humorous pictures. Perhaps the most interesting is The Wigsteads: A Christening which depicts Rowlandson’s friend and fellow caricaturist Henry Wigstead (1745 – 1800) and his family. Although I also have a soft spot for the untitled caricature of a group of drunken students being sternly regarded by their tutors. It appears as though some things never change.

I should point out, before anyone gets all excited and starts emailing me to enquire whether I’d be willing to sell this drawing or that drawing, that none of these pictures belong to me and I’m not offering them for sale. The images are taken from various sale catalogues and are being shared here in order to record original works which would otherwise disappear into anonymous private collections once the auctions have taken place.

 ‘The Afternoon Visit’, n.d., pen, ink and watercolour, 15 x 24cm

‘The patient’, n.d., pen, ink and watercolour 16.5 x 11.5cm

‘Interior scene’, n.d., pen, ink and watercolour, 10 x 17.5cm

The Wigsteads: A Christening, n.d., pen, ink and watercolour 17 x 30cm

 

‘Outside the Oyster Room’, n.d., pen, ink and watercolour, 13 x 9.5cm

Chamber Council, n.d., pen, ink and watercolour, 15 x 19cm

Oakhampton, Cornwall, 1816, pen, ink and watercolour, 16.5 x 24cm

 

‘At the Cottage Door’, n.d., pen, ink and watercolour, 14.25 x 9.5cm

 

 

‘Student drinking club’, n.d., pen, ink and watercolour, 26.5 x 32.5 cm

 

 

Thomas Rowlandson, The Fire at the Key, 1806

Shortly before midnight on 4th June 1806, a heavily inebriated man stumbled through the door of the Key Hotel in Chandos Street and ordered a meal. He was a cheerful character in his late 30s, and he dressed in a refined if somewhat sombre fashion which led many casual observers to assume that he was a priest of some kind. Unfortunately, his dress was the only sober thing about him that evening, as member of staff at the Key would later attest that he had visited the establishment several times in the last few weeks and was always the worse for drink.

The guest washed his meal down with a bottle of wine and ordered a further two bottles to be taken up to his room. The historical sources are silent on the quality of the repast but it probably mattered little to our friend, as food, drink, and accommodation, were all incidental to the main service that The Key provided to its guests; it was one of the most notorious bagnios in all of early nineteenth-century London and allowed resident and strolling prostitutes alike to ply their trade openly within its walls.

At around 2.30am the guest retired to bed with a young lady. A chambermaid was dispatched to their room a few minutes later in order to help the prostitute undress, but she reported that the man had passed out in stupor on the bedroom floor and that his companion had gone to bed without him. Fearing that he might wake up in the night and not know where he was, she lit a candle and left it on the floor next to the man before returning downstairs. Fifteen minutes later, the hotel was filled with sound of a woman screaming. A waiter, who ran up from the dining hall, found the prostitute standing on the landing in her night gown in hysterics, thick smoke and the flicker of flames emanating from the open bedroom doorway next to her.

The room was already engulfed in flames and the waiter immediately concluded that any attempt to rescue the drunken guest would be folly. Instead, he calmed the young lady and they then ran from door to door, rousing the other guests and alerting them to the danger. Chaos ensued as half-dressed working girls and their unsuspecting punters scrambled to save themselves. Many panicked, being unaware that the fire had yet to properly take hold of the building, and clambered from first floor windows, dropping into the street below. Their desperation was such that one old man, whose clothing had become entangled as he tried to escape, was left dangling above the street in ignominy; until someone was eventually able to haul him back into the hotel and help him flee via another route.

Crowds assembled in Hanoverian London at the drop of a hat and the spectacle of the Key’s destruction provoked a large assembly of slack-jawed gawkers, who mingled indiscriminately with hard-pressed parish fire-fighters and stunned prostitutes, as the building collapsed in front of them. It seems likely that Thomas Rowlandson was amongst the crowd, as his apartment in the Adelphi Buildings was just a few minutes walk from Chandos Street and would surely have been within earshot of the commotion. He later produced this watercolour of the scene, which is it seems safe to assume was heavily embellished with some of his stock comic characters in order to add humour and vitality to the proceedings.

Thomas Rowlandson, pen, ink and wash, 14.5 x 24cm. Signed and titled ‘The Fire at The Key, Chandos Street’.

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Notes
The European Magazine, and London Review, Volume 49 pp. 480 – 1.
Morning Chronicle, Friday 6th & 7th June 1806
Caledonian Mercury, 15th August 1806

The Connoisseur & Tired Boy

It seems as though I say this every time an original work by Thomas Rowlandson pops up at auction, but this watercolour really is one of the nicest examples of his work that I’ve seen in quite some time. The Conoisseur and Tired Boy [sic] is based on a now lost oil painting of 1773 by the artist Henry Morland (1716 – 1797), father of the famous rustic genre painter George Morland (1763 – 1804). A gorgeous mezzotint copy of the original was produced by Philip Dawe, Morland Senior’s former apprentice (fl. 1750 – 1791), in November 1773 and published by Robert Sayer (below right). It’s not clear whether Rowlandson took his inspiration from the original painting (which was exhibited on a number of occasions in 1775) or Dawe’s mezzotint. Given that Rowlandson’s picture is set out in the manner of a print, with the title of the image at the bottom of the paper, I’m tempted to suggest that it was probably the latter. I would also guess that Rowlandson was working from memory when he drew his picture, as he would presumably not have misspelled the title if he’d had a copy of Dawe’s print in front of him.  

 

While Rowlandson’s drawing lacks the technical skill of Dawes’s earlier engraving, particularly with regards to the latter’s masterful depiction of light and shade, it compensates for this by deploying more humour a far more exaggerated form of caricature. In this version the Connoisseur is depicted as the sort of gouty, wheelchair-bound, old geezer that Rowlandson seems to have delighted in making the butt of so many of his jokes. While the Tired Boy is transformed into a hideous grotesque who’s facial expression seems to have more in common with a terrifying scream than a yawn. The picture which the old man is examining is has also been changed to a portrait of a beautiful young woman removing a mask which is titled “How do you like me now?” This idea of connoisseurship being a respectable front for more base motivations was something Rowlandson would go on to explore more explicitly in his 1799 print Connoisseurs.

Rowlandson & Gillray in the Coal Hole

This is one of a number of small watercolours by Thomas Rowlandson that are coming for auction in London in a couple of weeks time. Whilst tavern scenes are, to put it mildly, not exactly uncommon in Rowlandson’s catalogue of prints and drawings, this scene is particularly interesting because it depicts a place that Rowlandson, James Gillray and other members of London’s engraving fraternity are known to have frequented.

The title of the piece, which has been written in the lower left corner of the picture, is The Cole Hole. This is presumably a reference to The Coal Hole tavern* in Fountains Court, the Strand. The tavern is mentioned in a short biography of Gillray which appeared in the Somerset House Gazette, and Literary Museum No. 26 in 1824:

He [Gillray] was a careless sort of cynic, one who neither loved, nor hated society… For years he occasionally smoked his pipe at the Bell, The Coal-hole, or the Coach-and-Hourses; and although the convives whom he met at such dingy rendezvous knew that he was that Gillray, who fabricated those comical cuts… He neither exacted, nor were the inclined to pay him, any particular homage. In truth, with his associateds, neighbouring shop-keepers and master-manufacturers, he passed for no greater wit than his neighbours. Rowlandson, his ingenious compeer, and he, sometimes met, they would, perhaps, exchange half-a-dozen questions and answers upon the affairs of copper and aquafortis; swear all the world was one vast masquerade; and then enter into the common chat of the room, smoke their cigars, drink their punch, and sometimes early, sometimes late, shake hands at the door – look up at the starts, say it is a frosty night and depart one for the Adelphi, the other to St James’s-street, each to his bachelor’s bed.

The picture may therefore offer us a rare glimpse into a scene from the everyday lives of the two great artists of late eighteenth-century England caricature. And I must admit, it doesn’t look like a bad spot in which to spend a couple of hours unwinding after a long day at work.

The picture measures 6 x 9 inches and carries Rudolph Ackermann’s shop stamp on the verso, which helps date it to sometime after 1800. The current estimate is between £800 – £1,200.

* The Coal Hole is apparently still trading as a public house today.

Update: Rowlandson painted another version of this painting sometime between 1810 and 1815 which can be found in The Birmingham Museum & Gallery collection. Sadly no images are available online but a colour photograph of the painting can be found in Payne & Payne’s biography of Rowlandson (Plate XXXII). The authors note that the Coal Hole was one of Rowlandson’s “nearest and favourite watering-holes” and that he would regularly carouse there amongst a clientele that consisted of artists, engravers, writers and other creative types (Regarding Thomas Rowlandson… p.342.)