This was the world Thomas Rowlandson grew into. For a while his father must have had good luck with his investments. When Thomas was nine he entered the Soho Academy, a boarding school intended for sons of "respectable" Englishmen. There he had for classmates young men such as Richard Burke (son of the politician Edmund Burke) and John Thomas Smith (who later came to be known as "Antiquity" Smith, keeper of prints at the British Museum). But his closest pals were Jack Bannister, whose father was a well‑known actor, and Henry Angelo, son of the Royal Fencing Master. A couple of incidents have come down to us--romping about with servant maids in the basement of the school, a student strike against the poor food, and the time Thomas "once gave great offense by carrying a pea-shooter into the life academy, and while old Moser was adjusting the female model, and had just directed her contour, Rowlandson let fly a pea, which, making her start, she threw herself entirely out of position, and interrupted the gravity of the study for the whole evening. For this offense, Master Rowlandson went near getting himself expelled."

For two years Thomas visited a wealthy widowed aunt, Madame Chattelier-Rowlandson, who lived in the extravagant Paris of Louis XV. There he began to paint in oils, and after returning to London entered the Royal Academy. Rowlandson first exhibited at the Academy in 1775 along with the older and established artists like Gainsborough, Romney and Sir Joshua Reynolds who was then its president. He continued showing at the Academy for almost a decade-and these early works must have been pretty standard productions, although they received the gracious praise of Reynolds and other respected artists such as the American expatriate Benjamin West. What could be called his first triumph came at the Royal Academy in 1784 with a water exhibition color drawing showing the visit of polite society and a pro­menade of commoners at Vauxhall Gardens. Encouraged by the warm public reception for his work in a lighter and more timely spirit than was usual in the largely vapid or somber Royal Academy style, Rowlandson left the dogged,pursuit of "serious" painting. He became instead someone far more important for the historian of art and culture: perhaps the most apt and accurate documenter of life in London over a period of almost half a century.

We have few biographical details for Thomas Rowlandson's life. Most of what we do know is derived from an obituary notice, and from comments in the memoirs of his long‑time friend Henry Angelo. The slight flaws of character Angelo observed in the artist are themselves interesting: there was a certain casualness toward fundamentals, an uncontrollable spirit, and he possessed too ready a sense of inventiveness.

Of course these were just the qualities that led to Rolandson's becoming enormously popular during his own time. In a way the lack of historical documentation for Rowlandson is much less important than it might seem, for his work was so full of immediacy, so spontaneous and revealing that it supplies some of the best evidence of his character and style that we could desire. Lawrence Binyon In his book, English Water-Colours, sketches this felicitous image of the artist:

“He accepted life as it was in the England of the days of George III and the Regency, totally uncritical of its boisterous and brutal aspects. Careless of money --he squandered in gambling a small fortune rleft him by the French aunt, and other legacies--fond of wine and women, a lover of gay company, of inns and travel, he was distinguished from a multitude of other roys­terers only by his marvelous gift and the amazing in­dustry in which it overflowed...whatever he did he enjoyed. An abounding and insatiable gusto of enjoyment pervades his work.”

His gift was a "kind of running fountain, purveyor of laughter to the average man," with a piquant taste for variety and an almost unboundable sense of energy for provoking both mockery and mirth. As W.H. Pyne wrote shortly after Rowlandson's death in 1827, "He has covered with his never-flagging pencil enough of charta pura to placard the whole walls of China, and etched as much copper as would sheath the British Navy."

All of this activity was not without its rewards. Rowland-son was an extremely successful artist. His drawings and prints were in all the publishers' shops in London. In a time when newspapers were just beginning to get started, it was frequently a practice for publishers to rush out editions of cartoons or caricatures of newsworthy events. Sometimes working through the night Rowlandson would pro­duce a drawing and an engraved plate which would then be run so that copies of his print would be on sale in shops the next morning. Events of the times provided Rowlandson with ample inspiration, such as the famous and wild Westminster election campaign of 1784.

The Duchess of Devonshire was one of his (and the London public's) favorite subjects, particularly because she was lovely and bountiful--but also because this marked the first time women had taken such an active part in politics. Rowlandson had the incendiary career of Charles James Fox, known as the "champion of the people," and the moves of his powerful adversary William Pitt to provide him with topics, along with the acts and antics of the rest of English nobility and of the royal family itself. It was the commanding figure of Napoloeon Buonaparte who suffered most from the satirical caricatures of Thomas Rowlandson in the first years of the nineteenth century. Before that, towards the end of the eighteeth century Rowlandson's sentiments were more or less set against the popular movement in France that culminated in the French Revolution., And of the American Revolution even earlier, there is but one reference in his work--a cartoon satirizing Lord North dating from 1781.

Throughout this period of upheaval when nations and empires were being founded and others were falling, Rowlandson's own fortunes fluctuated wildly. His father went bankrupt just before he came of age--but then the aunt died, leaving him some seven thousand pounds sterling. He may have gambled this away along with other inheritances, yet when he died, he left over three thousand pounds to his housekeeper--no small sum in those days. No matter what catatrosphe happened something always seemed to turn up to save him. There is a little story often repeated about Thomas Rowlandson that sums up his attitudes toward life and fate. One night, after particularly heavy losses at the fashionable London gaming tables--another man might have thought himself ruined--­Rowlandson merely held up his reed pen and sketching pencil with a laugh saying, "These are my resources."

It is perhaps understandable how the attitudes and tastes of Victorian England in the latter part of the nineteenth century reacted against the lusty, life-affirming style of men like Rowlandson. Esthetic tastes in America continued to be strongly influenced by the deep grain of Puritanism, and so also turned against the freer, heartier expressions of English arts and letters that culminated in the Regency period. As the restricting and repressive thicket of censorship has gradually become cleared, we can now set about rediscovering that part of Rowlandson's graphic work upon which doubtless much of genuine popularity was based.

The quality of Rowlandson's work is admittedly uneven. Some drawings were probably whipped out on the spur of the moment before he had quite escaped the influences of vast quantities of strong drink and prodigious meals--maybe even for the pur­poses of paying the bill. Down through history the artists of uniform excellence are exceedingly rare--and frequently this reputation is based upon the propensity of art historians to ascribe inferior productions to their students or followers.

With Rowlandson's voluminous creative activity there is a full range of highs and lows--and this is true for his erotic work just as it is for his treatment of other subjects. Having acknowledged this problem, we should remember that there is a considerable body of artistic expression--in all media, not only prints and drawings--that has been kept from the public for reasons of "good taste." Since Denis Diederot anyway there has been an intimate and unhappy connection between a refined sense of personal esthetics and its gross extrapolation into a concern for public morality. The same attitudes and assumptions underlay the social and cultural neuroses of Victorian England and their further development in psychotic institutionalization of censorship and artistic control by Adolf Hitler's Reichskunstkammer in Nazi Germany. The variety of meanings that can be attributed to "good" and "bad" judgments in art--confounding ethical, moral or political concerns with esthetic criteria as in the above examples suggests that in a free society the honest connoisseur or art historian, whether professional or amateur, must first confront the full evidence of the works of art themselves. Then he may render judgments about the respective merits or failings of the pieces in question, affirming his own esthetic responses and drawing whatever other implications he may choose. But these decisions should never be allowed as excuses to suppress the art denying others access to it.