Amelia Rauser

Accompanying the first major exhibition of Thomas Rowlandson's work in North America for some 20 years, this volume reflects the growing emphasis on the social and political context of the satirical watercolours, drawings and prints of the 18th and 19th century and in doing so rescues Rowlandson from what co-author Vic Gatrell calls "the immense condescension of posterity". This book explores Rowlandson's unique perspective on Georgian society, and opens up the whole subject of Georgian leisure and social life and the crossing of class boundaries. An introduction by Patricia Phagan describes Rowlandson's position within a hierarchical society. Illustrated essays by Vic Gatrell and Amelia Rauser examine Rowlandson's view of social life and leisure in London and his political satires. The main catalogue is divided into six thematic sections: high society and political campaigning; encounters on the street; gatherings in clubs and taverns; art, dance, and the theatre; outdoor diversions; and romantic trysts, tangles, and attachments. Over 70 of Rowlandson's original watercolours and drawings, as well as prints and illustrated books drawn from the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College as well as from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale Center for British Art, Lewis Walpole Library, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and Vassar College Libraries, Archives and Special Collections are presented.

This book is the first to examine the meaning encoded in the very form of caricature, a form of popular and polemical visual art that burst suddenly on the scene in late eighteenth-century England, and to explain its rise as a consequence of the emergence of modernity, especially the modern self. Caricature and the modern self developed in tandem: as the modern notion of selfhood_with its valorization of interiority, private authenticity, and consistency across time_rather suddenly replaced older, more flexible notions of identity, so caricature developed as a technology for representing this new self, making character visible on the surface of the body, unmasking the public role and revealing the authentic private self beneath. Through the detailed analysis of specific prints and a wide-ranging compilation of historical evidence, this book constructs a rich and precise cultural history of the conceptual shift that led to the explosion of caricature in late eighteenth-century England. Complemented with seventy-eight illustrations.