Wednesday 15 September 2010Pleasures and Pursuits in Georgian England
Thomas Rowlandson
Thomas Rowlandson: Pleasures and Pursuits in Georgian England is a completely new illustrated volume which presents 72 watercolours, drawings, prints, and illustrated books to reassess the legacy of this renowned 18th-century satirist. Published in February 2011 by D Giles Limited in association with the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, it accompanies the first major exhibition of Rowlandson’s work in North America for 20 years, and reflects the growing emphasis on the social and political context of the satirical art of the 18th- and early 19th-centuries. In so doing, it rescues Rowlandson from what co-author Vic Gatrell calls “the immense condescension of posterity.” This catalogue explores Rowlandson’s unique perspective on Georgian social life, and the crossing of class boundaries.
With heavy-handed humour and a low subject matter, the work of Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827) provides an invaluable insight into the workings and mentality of late Georgian society. He was quite simply a product of his times, who relished recording the street life of London and whose drawings and etchings reveal an attraction to repulsive visions of wickedness and hardship, whilst maintaining a high degree of humanity.
An introduction by curator Patricia Phagan of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center relays the impetus for the exhibition and describes Rowlandson’s position within a hierarchical society. Illustrated essays by Vic Gatrell of Cambridge University and Amelia Rauser of Franklin and Marshall College 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. Each section is introduced by a brief overview text.
The Authors
Patricia Phagan is Philip and Lynn Straus Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center and the co-author of The American Scene and the South: Paintings and Works on Paper, 1930–1946 (1996) and Images of Women in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Domesticity and the Representation of the Peasant (1996). Vic Gatrell is Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and the author of City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (2006) and The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770–1868 (1994). Amelia Rauser is Associate Professor of Art History at Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and author of Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints (2008)
THOMAS ROWLANDSON: PLEASURES AND PURSUITS IN GEORGIAN ENGLAND
184 pages, 305 x 229mm (9 x 12 in.), portrait
127 colour illustrations, hardback
Text: Up to 47,000 words
ISBN: 978 1 904832 78 2
Price: US$59.95/UK£39.95
Publication date: February, 2011
Publisher: D Giles Limited, London
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