Print-sellers' shops, at home and abroad, were ransacked, and auctions of engravings were attended, whenever the alluring word caricatures occurred in the catalogue. The supply was remarkably limited, the demand considerable and increasing; and prices, from the nature of the request, shortly became unreasonable. Choice caricatures, or those in fairly good condition, were pushed up to nearly the prices of the original drawings, and even at these enhanced rates but few examples were forthcoming. In Paris, Brussels, and London, a five-pound note became about a fair equivalent for a moderately fine impression after Rowlandson, if the plate were large and the subject important or curious, while for certain of the more sought-after examples, this rate was doubled; for such plates as Vauxhall Gardens, dealers expect a still larger price—indeed, five-and-twenty pounds have been demanded in many instances. The chances of fresh examples by Rowlandson coming into the market have decreased, and possibly the competition will relax when there is no longer a chance of exciting it.
The writer has necessarily made the acquaintance of several gentlemen who are fervent collectors of Rowlandson's works, and he by no means ignores his obligations to those happy possessors of rarer specimens, who have frequently carried them off with an air of conquest from discomfited rival amateurs, the condition of their purses, and the artistic enthusiasm aroused at the moment, rendering similar triumphs comparatively facile, when incidental questions as to actual worth are too insignificant to engage the attention.
Certain collectors of eminence, who are discriminating selectors of caricatures, well qualified to judge of their technical merits, and who, further, are well posted up in curious and out-of-the-way points of the political and social histories of the times thus illustrated, have volunteered the results of their researches; these good-natured offers have arrived too late to be available, but the writer is not the less indebted to the kindness which prompted the action; in an earlier and preparatory stage, these advances would have been of considerable value and assistance.
So much for the materials; perhaps too much stress has been laid, as far as the reader's patience is concerned, on the preliminary difficulties which have hindered and weakened the execution of the writer's desire to reproduce, by pencil and pen, a fair gathering of the works of our greatest humorous designers, an idea long cherished, and tardily carried out, as regards the first part of his task, James Gillray; and beset, as he has recounted, in respect to Thomas Rowlandson, the concluding portion, by unforeseen impediments and technical difficulties which it would be tedious to enumerate; they may, however, in a minor degree, be taken into consideration as a plea for the obvious shortcomings of this laborious compilation, and, while inclining rigid specialists to be less exacting, induce critics to regard the unavoidable faults of the performance with lenient forbearance.
For the space of a century, Rowlandson's caricatures, which are more properly croquis of the life which surrounded him, have continued to afford delight to the appreciators of graphic humour, from the date, 1775, when he sent his first contribution to the Royal Academy. It was only this year (1878) that a pair of his remarkably spirited drawings, Faro Table at Devonshire House, and A Gaming Table, attracted considerable praise and attention on the walls of the Grosvenor Gallery. Although the artist was master of the most elegant refinement, both of delineation and colouring, and produced the most delicious female heads with that lightness and daintiness of touch which was his peculiar gift, bringing all the graces, sparkle and animation of the French school to bear upon the models of winsome female beauty our own favoured isles produced for the exercise of his pencil, we are constrained to admit, thus early in our summary, that too many of his productions are strongly tinctured by that coarseness of subject and sentiment which has been held to disfigure the works of contemporary humorists; his wit, it must be remembered, was of the jocose school of Smollett and Fielding, and in justice it must be taken into consideration that his designs, even in their most uncompromising and grosser aspects, simply reflect the colour of a period which was the reverse of squeamish, and, as has been pertinently observed by the late Thomas Wright, 'of a generation celebrated for anything rather than delicacy.'
The artist was pretty generally recognised as the famous illustrator of Doctor Syntax and The Dance of Death, and in this relation he is fairly acknowledged by posterity; this limited view, as the present volume is designed to demonstrate, being far indeed from an adequate acknowledgment of his proper artistic standing. Rowlandson's higher qualifications, as a draughtsman in water-colours of remarkable merit, a portrait-painter of felicitous promise, and the originator of countless witty and pointed conceptions, were discovered more tardily. His surprising facility for representing the human figure, with knowledge and freedom of execution, his marvellous power of combining groups and crowds of figures in active movement, his grasp of expression, and fluency of colour and handling, were more particularly admitted (though in a sense they have since been lost sight of) after the Exhibition of 1862, where two of his truly characteristic subjects, of considerable size, made their appearance on the walls, to the amazement and delight of the spectators, who had no previous acquaintance with his whimsical genius. These two drawings, which opened the eyes of the world to his gifts for a little season, are entitled An English Review and A French Review; they originally formed a very noticeable feature on the walls of the Royal Academy in 1786; it is believed that eventually they came into the possession of the Prince of Wales, and, with the rest of George IV.'s collection, have remained in keeping of the royal family ever since, her gracious Majesty, the Queen, being pleased to lend them, with other fine representative examples of art, to the Exhibition Commissioners of 1862.