Tuesday 4 January 2011 Rowlandson exhibition opens at the Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art

Thomas Rowlandson: Pleasures and Pursuits in Georgian England will show at the Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Illinois, from January 14, 2011 through March 13, 2011, before travelling to the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College.

One of the most popular satirists of his time, Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827) applied his masterful drawing skills and keen sense of humour to colourful, detailed, and sometimes bawdy depictions of everyday life in and around Georgian London during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Curated by Patricia Phagan, the Philip and Lynn Straus Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, the exhibition is the first on Rowlandson in the U.S. in twenty years. The works in the exhibition are drawn from the collections of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale Center for British Art, Lewis Walpole Library, and Vassar College Libraries, Archives and Special Collections.