UPROAR! E-Book

Alice Loxton

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 531

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

**A brilliant new history of Georgian Britain through the eyes of the artists who immortalised it, by one of the UK's most exciting young historians** 'Alice Loxton is the star of her generation ... the next big thing in history' Dan Snow London, 1772: a young artist called Thomas Rowlandson is making his way through the grimy backstreets of the capital, on his way to begin his studies at the Royal Academy Schools. Within a few years, James Gillray and Isaac Cruikshank would join him in Piccadilly, turning satire into an artform, taking on the British establishment, and forever changing the way we view power. Set against a backdrop of royal madness, political intrigue, the birth of modern celebrity, French revolution, American independence and the Napoleonic Wars, UPROAR! follows the satirists as they lampoon those in power, from the Prince Regent to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Their prints and illustrations deconstruct the political and social landscape with surreal and razor-sharp wit, as the three men vie with each other to create the most iconic images of the day. UPROAR! fizzes with energy on every page. Alice Loxton writes with verve and energy, never failing to convince in her thesis that Gillray and his gang profoundly altered British humour, setting the stage for everything from Gilbert and Sullivan to Private Eye and Spitting Image today. This is a book that will cause readers to reappraise everything they think they know about genteel Georgian London, and see it for what it was - a time of UPROAR!

Leseprobe

‘Alice Loxton is a whirlwind of historical energy and UPROAR! is a sensational debut, which marks her out as one of the brightest new stars of popular history’

Dan Jones, author of Powers and Thrones

‘A rollicking ride through late eighteenth century Britain in all its effervescent rudeness and hilarity. Hugely entertaining’

Dr Linda Porter, author of Mistresses

‘Alice Loxton’s analysis of Georgian England is razor sharp, witty and engaging. An appropriately “laugh out loud” history of the age of satire’

Helen Carr, author of The Red Prince

‘Alice Loxton heads the charge of an exciting new generation of historians – this is an exuberant, iconoclastic and, yes, uproarious debut’

Jessie Childs, author of The Siege of Loyalty House

‘As wittily subversive and deeply entertaining as the material it details, Alice Loxton’s UPROAR! is a delightful romp through the colourful and controversial eighteenth century. Loxton has built a time-machine in a book, and invited us all along for a ride. I would suggest you hop in!’

Dr Joanne Paul, author of The House of Dudley

‘Loxton writes with a terrific sense of time and place. She delivers Georgian Britain in a bold modern manner, with plenty of bounce’

Franny Moyle, author of Desperate Romantics

‘Alice Loxton’s UPROAR! is a delight: an energetic and highly enjoyable exploration of the careers and the turmoil of the social and political world of the leading caricaturists of the great age of satire, Thomas Rowlandson, James Gillray, and Isaac Cruikshank. So rich is her research and so vivid is her prose that we emerge from reading this book feeling that we have argued, laughed and drunk punch with these men and felt the fierce brilliance of their minds and their art – which shines bright still today’

Jeremy Musson, author of The Country House: Past, Present, Future

‘As vivid and vibrant as any Rowlandson print – bawdy, beautiful, and brilliant’

Kate Lister, author of A Curious History of Sex

‘Loxton plunges us headfirst into the tumultuous world of London’s eighteenth-century printmakers in this lively, riveting and pacy account’

Charlotte Mullins, author of A Little History of Art

‘A gripping, energetic and easy to follow deep dive into the raucous satire revolution of late Georgian Britain. Alice has created a diamond of a debut book’

Tristan Hughes, author of The Perdiccas Years, 323–320 BC

Published in the UK and USA in 2023 by

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ISBN: 978-178578-954-0

eBOOK ISBN: 978-178578-956-4

Text copyright © 2023 Alice Loxton

The author has asserted her moral rights.

Map rights details: Rocque, J., Pine, J. & Tinney, J. (1746) A plan of the cities of London and Westminster, and borough of Southwark, with the contiguous buildings. London, John Pine & John Tinney. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/76696823/.

Portrait of James Gillray on p. v, Charles Turner, 1819, mezzotint after Gillray’s self-portrait, National Portrait Gallery, London.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in LTC Caslon Pro by Marie Doherty

Printed in the UK by TJ Books

For James Gillray

‘Laughter is a bodily exercise, precious to health.’

– ARISTOTLE (SO THEY SAY)

Contents

Author’s Note

Map

Timeline

ACT I

1A Bench of Artists

2Putrid Masquerades and Twittery

3A Kingdom Trusted to a School-Boy’s Care

4A Stillness the Most Uncommon

5Now That’s What I Call Satire!: 1789

ACT II

6The Foulest and Most Atrocious Deed

7A Bullet Whizzes to Catch the Phizzes

8Frugal Meals and Horrors of Digestion

9What a Picture of Life Was There!

10A Wonderland of Delights

ACT III

11The First Kiss This Ten Years

12Maniac Ravings and Low Scurrilities

13Advantages of Wearing Muslin Dresses

14The Crew to Pluto’s Realm

15Cancelled

Acknowledgements

Notes

Bibliography

Author’s Note

London at the close of the eighteenth century was a circus: port-pickled politicians wept over the brilliance of classical oratory; duchesses pranced through butchers’ shops in a flutter of lace and ribbons; and every vagabond and countess, scoundrel and bishop gossiped with glee over the Royal Academy’s placement of a fig leaf.

But right in the heart of this pantomime was a force, a magnetism, so strong it kept the entire city in check. This force was not imposed by king or law, but the electric creativity emanating from a set of visionary artists. Their satirical prints were so acerbic, so insightful, that every Londoner’s folly and foible was fair game. Earls and rakes, fishwives and barbers were kept awake at night. Life-long reputations were destroyed in an instant. No one was safe.

Yet, this story is unknown by all but a few enthusiasts and academics. UPROAR! seeks to change that.

A word of guidance, though. The following pages are not for the faint-hearted. We are about to journey through some of the most dramatic and thrilling moments in British history. We will encounter madness and cruelty, revolution and war.

But it is also a story to inspire and delight. Prepare to come face-to-face with some of the greatest visionaries this country has ever seen. As we follow their journey and peer over their shoulders, we will glimpse dazzling sparks of genius. Sunglasses are advised.

We’ll pry into the most intimate moments of our ancestors’ lives – see them sneeze and yawn, hear them giggle and snort. In turn, you might find we’re probing deep into the secrets of your own character, too. Be prepared to be shocked. Be prepared to weep. And definitely be prepared to laugh.

So, hold on to your hats. It’s going to be a rollicking ride. Welcome to the world of UPROAR!

Alice Loxton

Covent Garden

September 2022

Map and Timeline

Key to map

1103 Wardour Street, where Rowlandson stayed with Aunt Jane until 1786

250 Poland Street, the home of Rowlandson’s Aunt Jane from 1786

32 Robert Street, Rowlandson’s ‘dismal’ basement lodgings, where he lived 1792–c. 1795

41 James Street, Rowlandson’s final lodgings

5St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, where Rowlandson is buried

666 Drury Lane, William Holland’s early print shop

750 Oxford Street, William Holland’s Laughing Lounge print shop

818 Old Bond Street, Hannah Humphrey’s print shop (1779–83 and 1790–94)

951 Old Bond Street, Hannah Humphrey’s print shop (1783–9)

1037 New Bond Street, Hannah Humphrey’s print shop (1794–7)

1127 St James’s Street, Hannah Humphrey’s print shop (1797–1817)

12St James’s Church, Piccadilly, where Gillray is buried

133 Piccadilly, Samuel Fores’ print shop until 1796

1450 Piccadilly, Samuel Fores’ print shop from 1796

15St Martin’s Court, the Cruikshanks’ early lodgings

16117 Dorset Street, where the Cruikshanks’ lived later on

17St Bride’s Church, where Isaac Cruikshank is buried

18Somerset House, home to the Royal Academy from 1771

19Devonshire House, home of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

20St James’s Palace

21Carlton House, the notorious building project of Prince George

22Rudolph Ackermann’s print shops (96 Strand 1795–7, 101 Strand 1796–1827)

23111 Cheapside, Thomas Tegg’s Apollo Library

NB: This map dates from the 1740s, giving us an idea of what London looked like when the artists were born. There wasn’t a great deal of change in the following decades, so it can be used as a rough guide for the city plan during their lives, too. Major developments included the Adam brothers’ Adelphi complex, where Rowlandson lived.

GENERAL HISTORIC DATES

UPROAR! DATES

Act I

1

A Bench of Artists

A SOBER, DILIGENT PERSON OVER THE AGE OF TWELVE

6 November 1772.1 A fifteen-year-old whippersnapper named Tom scurried through the grimy backstreets of eighteenth-century London. As the bells of St Paul’s tolled out to herald a new day, he tripped and skipped and darted across potholes, broken glass and horse dung. He overheard tavern keepers evict sleeping drunks and caught snippets of gossip from dutiful maids as they carried out their early-morning errands. The November sunlight pierced through dusty windows of ale houses and coffee shops, and the city erupted into life once again.

Stumbling out of this labyrinth, Tom burst out into the wide-open space of one of central London’s most fashionable streets: the Strand, a playground for the super-rich. Tom might have glanced through the shopfronts to gaze upon curious delicacies from across the globe: coffee from Arabia, silks from Madras or furs from New York. He probably passed No. 216, where the tearooms of Thomas Twining emitted the tantalising scent of finely blended tea. Or the bookshop at No. 34, where Samuel Johnson could often be spied, poring over the vast collection of titles. As he trotted westward, Tom was vigilant to dodge the obstacles of the street: the wide, square hoops of fashionable ladies in sack-back gowns, or the hordes of labourers, toiling to complete the latest building schemes of Robert Adam, the great neoclassical architect of the day.

In the early 1770s, Britain was on the brink of transformation. In 1771, the inventor Richard Arkwright opened the first cotton mill at Cromford, Derbyshire, marking the start of Britain’s Factory Age. Meanwhile, up and down the country, thousands of curious punters gathered to listen to the electrifying words of Methodist preacher John Wesley. And across the Atlantic Ocean, long-growing tensions in the American colonies, in which calls for ‘No taxation without representation’ were reaching boiling point, would soon erupt with the Boston Tea Party in 1773. It was on such issues as these that 34-year-old King George III – in the twelfth year of his reign by 1772 – would have consulted his prime minister, Lord North.

Nowhere was the change more apparent than in London, a city which was swelling at incredible pace. It was a thriving metropolis, flooded by thousands of young people each year eager to make something of themselves. In 1700, the city’s population numbered about half a million. By 1800, it would double to 1 million, the first city in Europe to do so since Ancient Rome.2 The streets were buzzing with horse-drawn hackney coaches and trading carts bouncing over the cobblestones, and sedan chairs and pedestrians in their thousands.

All of these were easily avoided by our young friend Tom as he picked his way down the Strand. And today, he was bursting with excitement. For he was heading for the Royal Academy Schools to begin his first day of study. This was the start of his great career to become Britain’s Next Top Artist.

Tom knew these streets like the back of his hand: he was a Londoner born and bred. His family, the Rowlandsons, were of Huguenot extraction. His grandparents still lived in silk-weaving Spitalfields (then green fields to the east). But Thomas’ parents, William and Mary Rowlandson, were based in the beating heart of the City of London, on Old Jewry. It was here that Thomas Rowlandson was born on 13 July 1757.

The family made a respectable living by trading wool and silk. But it wasn’t an easy ride. When young Tom was a toddler, his father’s business hit the rocks. ‘The elder Rowlandson,’ it would be recorded in Tom’s obituary, ‘who was of a speculative turn, lost considerable sums experimenting upon various branches of manufactures, which were tried on too large a scale of his means; hence his affairs became embarrassed.’3 On 16 January 1759, William Rowlandson was declared bankrupt, and to hammer home the humiliation, it was printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine for the world to see.

Creditors seized the family house. William and Mary upped sticks and hurried north to Richmond, Yorkshire. Luckily, William’s brother, James, had made less of a hash of things. He was a prosperous Spitalfields silk weaver, happily married to a generous Frenchwoman named Jane. Having no children of their own, they took in young Tom, allowing him to remain in London.

But tragedy struck in 1764. Uncle James died of fever. Aunt Jane sold the business and moved to rooms on Church Street, Soho. She sent Tom to Dr Barwis’ school on Soho Square, ‘the first academy in London’.4 In language befitting an Ofsted report, the school was said to attain ‘an extraordinary degree of excellence’.5

The school’s founder, Martin Clare, had described himself as ‘M. Clare, School-Master in Soho Square, London. With whom Youth may Board, and be fitted for business.’6 Clare was the author of two utilitarian books: Youth’s Introduction to Trade and Business and Rules and Orders for the Government of the Academy in Soho Square. For just £30 a year, plus a sprinkling of paid-for extras, parents could expect their sons to excel in French, drawing, dancing and fencing, and get a decent grounding in morality, religion and philosophy, too.

When Tom enlisted, in the 1760s, the school was run by Rev. Cuthbert Barwis, who added a dash of theatrics to the mix. Under his thespian leadership, the Soho School became famed for the masterful array of Shakespeare plays performed by the pupils. His eccentricity was not lost on an impressionable cast of schoolboys, who turned out to be an impressive bunch: the actors Joseph Holman, John Liston and Jack Bannister, as well as the artist J.M.W. Turner, all passed through Dr Barwis’ doors.

Tom was popular with his peers, who dubbed him ‘Rowly’.* It was in these boisterous classes where Tom, struggling to engage his mind with competing theories of trade and economics, began doodling. The margins of his books were soon black with scribblings of ‘humorous characters of his master and many of his scholars’.7 In Tom’s fifteenth year, these sketches were considered worthy of more than just textbook marginalia. Probably with the encouragement of Barwis – keen for some more sparkle to add to his list of alumni – Tom was put forward to apply for the brand-spanking-new Royal Academy Schools.

The Academy Schools were part of the Royal Academy of Arts, itself less than four years old after being founded in 1768. It had been launched by the Instrument of Foundation, a scheme signed off by King George III. In a pompous and unimaginative declaration, it claimed to be a ‘well-regulated School or Academy of Design, for the use of students in the Arts, and an Annual Exhibition, open to all artists of distinguished merit’.8

So, this was the official establishment of the hub of British creativity. And the chosen lexicon was … ‘well-regulated’. The British art scene kicked off in a haze of procedure and red tape. How thrilling! How wild! How shockingly subversive! When George III trawled through the 27 clauses relating to membership, government, officers, schools, professors, servants, exhibitions, library, admin, red tape, procedure and admin, his unbridled enthusiasm for this new arm of top brass was duly noted next to a signature: ‘I approve of this plan; let it be put in execution.’9

Despite a muted beginning on paper, the Royal Academy was founded with good intentions. It sought to provide a standard of excellence to a hitherto unregulated and unprofessional art scene. In affiliation with the Royal Academy came the Academy Schools, at which Tom became a student. Originally based in defunct auction rooms in Pall Mall, in 1771 the school moved to extensive space in the old Somerset House in the Strand. This comprised a lecture room, a library, a room for life drawing, known as the Life Room, and a hall filled with casts of classical sculpture called the Plaister Academy.

The entry requirements were tough. Prospective students were expected to be pretty clued up already, having ‘An acquaintance with Anatomy (comprehending a knowledge of the Skeleton, and the Names, Origins, Insertions, and Uses of, at least, the external layers of Muscles)’.10

To separate the wheat from the chaff, candidates were invited to the premises to be tested. Tom had been put through his paces at his interview. He was brought for inspection to the Keeper of the Schools, George Michael Moser, an elderly Swiss-born artist, who had once been a drawing-master to the King, and a specialist in ornamental enamels.*

Moser was happy enough with Master Rowlandson’s submitted samples, but still needed convincing. Tom was sent to the Plaister Academy. For several long, nerve-wracking days, he toiled away on a further set of drawings: marking out every tiny detail, triple-checking his angles and trying to steady his shaking hand. Tom knew that his whole career rested on these studies, and he spent every waking minute working them up to perfection.

The endeavour paid off. His application was approved by the council, and a letter of admission dispatched by Francis Newton, the secretary of the Academy. He was in!

But would Tom suit the ‘well-regulated’ demands of this prestigious institution? He had all the ingredients to become a great artist – a technical ability beyond his years, an unwavering self-belief, a sharp mind bursting with ideas, and a quick wit to charm his way through polite society.

He was admitted on the condition that he ‘behave with that respect which is due to an Institution subsisting under the gracious protection of the Sovereign’.11 But in truth, Tom didn’t often observe such rules of the room – he was better known for his ‘social spirit’. He was a young lad ‘who sought the company of dashing young men; and, among other evils, imbibed a love for play’.12

It was perhaps following such indulgence that Tom pranced down the Strand and finally stepped foot inside the walls of the Academy Schools on that sunny November morning in 1772.

AN ACQUAINTANCE WITH ANATOMY

It must have been a thrilling moment for Tom when he first tiptoed through the Academy drawing rooms, squeezing his skinny frame past the back-of-house clutter and classical casts. His pulse must have raced as he hunted for a seat in the Life Room: he edged along the rounded benches, careful not to knock the shaded candleholders on each desk, and unpacked his bag. Only now he noticed the walls were covered from floor to ceiling with shelves, overflowing with classical casts, dusty figurines and other backroom knick-knacks.

Hugging the walls of the room were long rows of tables and benches, tiered and curved to create an amphitheatre-like space – meaning that every desk would have an uninterrupted view of the central platform. Here posed a living, breathing model, with every bulge and twist of their naked body illuminated by a single oil lamp suspended from the ceiling. To keep within the bounds of propriety, the rules were strict: ‘No Student under the Age of twenty shall be admitted to draw after the female model, unless he be a married man.’13

Drawing from Life at the Royal Academy, Somerset House, Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin, 1808.

Royal Academy of Arts, London

In the Life Room (sometimes called the School of Living Models), Tom would be taught to understand the secrets of classical grandeur, the grace of the human form, and sensible ideas of ‘taste’. It was a syllabus created by a 49-year-old ear-trumpet-wielding vicar’s son from Devon: the president of the Royal Academy, Joshua Reynolds. The teaching was led by a series of visiting artists, known as Academicians, who were elected to teach for one month each, on rotation. During term time the life classes ran for two hours every evening, and in the summer students were booted out to make way for the Academy’s annual Summer Exhibition.

The earliest surviving sketch from Tom’s days at the Academy tells us that he got the hang of drawing pretty quickly. But the image is not one of the Academy’s languishing nude models placed in a classical recline. Tom had been looking elsewhere. He’d been busy sketching seven fellow students on the opposite side of the room. ‘A Bench of Artists,’ reads the annotation, ‘Sketched at the Royal Academy in the Year 1776–’.

Squashed together with just enough elbow room and with pairs of legs sprawling out from the bench like those of a centipede, here are the future stars of the art world, some daydreaming, some smirking, some diligent, some anxious.

Taking centre stage is 23-year-old William Beechey, who would become the leading English portraitist of his day. Think of a famous name and Beechey would one day paint them: George III, George IV, William IV, young Queen Victoria, Nelson, Wellington, actresses, politicians – the works. The student on Beechey’s left appears to be slouching, but this dark-haired artist was the 24-year-old Charles Reuben Ryley, who had a ‘weakly constitution’ and was ‘deformed in figure’.14 Unlike Rowlandson, Ryley is diligently concentrating on drawing the life model, his great bushy brows raised in magnificent arches.

A Bench of Artists, Thomas Rowlandson, 1776.

Tate. Purchased as part of the Oppé Collection with assistance from the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund 1996.

Students also developed their understanding of anatomy through the study of plaster casts. The Plaister Gallery, which provided an informal setting to study and form friendships, was open from Monday to Saturday, 9am to 3pm. It was available throughout the year apart from four weeks in September, two weeks from Christmas Eve to Epiphany, and 46 days in April and May. Rules were to be strictly obeyed. Students were forbidden from touching, let alone moving, the valuable casts:

There shall be Weekly, set out in the Great Room, One or more Plaister Figures by the Keeper, for the Students to draw after, and no Student shall presume to move the said Figures out of the Places where they have been set by the Keeper, without his leave first obtained for that Purpose.15

Regulations were even required to prevent students nabbing each other’s drawing spots, declaring that ‘when any Student hath taken possession of a Place in the Plaister Academy, he shall not be removed out of it, till the Week in which he hath taken it is expired’.16

The room displayed the Academy’s collection of busts, figures and ornamental reliefs. Here, students could learn how the great artists and craftsmen from Ancient Rome, Renaissance Florence and Bourbon France had moulded flesh from marble. Unlike the life models, who often moved to itch a crooked nose or stretched only to return to a different position, the plaster casts captured the ideal of mankind’s beauty, unmoving and unblemished.

The casts were made from gesso, a mixture of chalk, gypsum and white pigment – a mixture that remains largely unchanged for artistic study today. Students were encouraged to cultivate a light source using candles and mirrors, creating a deeper eye socket or furrowed brow. How did the flicker of a flame splay out Newton’s spectra of colour? How did this expose new forms of the gesso physique?

With the guidance of Academicians, Tom began to unpick the secrets of his profession. As he replicated the graceful swirls of drapery of the Apollo Belvedere, he noticed how they articulated the body to both reveal and conceal the torso and limbs. He discovered how figures posed in the contrapposto stance – where the weight falls more heavily on one foot, swaying the hips and relaxing the shoulders – made the sculpture seem to come alive.

Finally, he understood what Pliny and Vitruvius had meant when they wrote of ‘the ideal beauty’. All of these tributes to the human form had been developed from mathematical ratios. As the students sketched away in the shadows of dancing fawns and Greek goddesses, they were reminded of great lessons of the past: ‘It’s coming along, Tom, but this angle under the chin isn’t quite right. The collarbone is too short. Remember the words of Leonardo: the length of the outspread arms is equal to the height of a man.’

Tom and his fellow students were also given permission to draw from the cast collection at the Duke of Richmond’s private sculpture gallery at Whitehall. Admission cards were provided, much like the library cards university students have today. These were about the size of a passport and emblazoned with a large red wax seal marked: ‘ROYAL ACADEMY, LONDON’.

A letter from Aunt Jane on 25 November 1772 was required to assure the assistant secretary at the Academy that her nephew would behave himself:

The bearer Master Thomas Rowlandson being Desirous of becoming a student in his Grace the Duke of Richmond’s Gallery – the recommendary figure delivered you by him being his own performance and it being necessary to find security for his good behaver in admission I humbly offer myself for that Purpas and am with much respects.

Your mo: ob: servant,

J. Rowlandson17

The Antique School at New Somerset House, Edward Francis Burley, c. 1780.

Royal Academy of Arts, London

HIS TWELFTH GLASS OF PUNCH

Whether Aunt Jane was confident in her unruly nephew’s behaviour – and whether Tom lived up to these promises – is hard to know. But it wouldn’t matter for long. By 1774, in ‘his sixteenth year’, he was whisked away on a Royal Academy ‘study abroad’ scheme, at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris. Here he would acquire a taste for French methods and fashions, build contacts with collectors and, as Aunt Jane probably hoped, grow up a bit.

As Tom caught a coach down to Dover for the passage across the Channel, he picked up ‘an Englishman of the name of Higginson’, also heading off to study at the Académie Royale.18 Higginson had hundreds of contacts in Paris, so Tom realised he was well worth sticking with.

These two teenage Brits arrived ‘immediately after the death of Louis the Fifteenth at the moment of the putting on of public mourning’.19 Incredibly, King Louis had ruled since 1715, a reign of 59 years, so the boys arrived to find a city that was in a pensive mood.

Rowlandson’s Parisian study was sponsored by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, one of the wealthiest and most respected sculptors in France. Not only could Pigalle fashion innate lumps of stone into contorted human flesh, he had a network full of star-studded names. The sculptor had enjoyed the patronage of the cherry on topof the crème de la crème:Louis XV’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour. To meet Pigalle as a young artist, let alone be sponsored and probably taught by him, was the opportunity of a lifetime. If joining the Royal Academy under Sir Joshua Reynolds was the chance to get a five-minute interview on The One Show, studying with Pigalle in Paris was the equivalent of being sent to Hollywood.

At this point, Paris was a ‘ridiculous jumble of shells, dragons, reeds, palm-trees and plants’, according to the neoclassical painter Merry-Joseph Blondel.20 For these were the final years of France’s love affair with Rococo – a style which luxuriated in elegant extravagance and frothy decoration, and a time when men and women were decked in frills, ruffles, bows and lace. Artists of the Rococo didn’t bother to lay down weighty political metaphors or comment on the grinding poverty of the French farmer. They preferred to paint a window into a chocolate box world of love, classical myths, youth and playfulness.

Pigalle’s classically inspired portrait busts and full-size sculptures indulged in this era of light-hearted mischief. He pricked the pomposity of noble heroes by giving them a human edge. In 1753, he made a sculpture of a young boy leaning over to buckle his sandals. Was this an ice-cream-wielding child on a Cornish beach, holding up the entire family as they strapped up their jelly shoes? Not quite. This was Mercury, the mighty messenger of Roman Gods.

How about Pigalle’s ode to Voltaire, the pillar of the French Enlightenment. Would he be decked in grand robes of ancient times, befitting his status as a great thinker? Pigalle didn’t bother to clothe him at all. There he is, completely starkers, saved only by some convenient drapery. When King Gustavus III of Sweden saw the portrait, his first reaction was supposedly to offer to buy Voltaire a coat.

Although the coat never materialised, art historians have since dressed Pigalle’s work up with some erudite but predictable analysis (we are told to admire his ‘truth of form, expression, and gesture’).21 But the real point is that while Pigalle was a highly competent artist, his lumps of stone captured the subtleties of human expression and betrayed a real, living character.

It was to be an important lesson for young Tom Rowlandson, had he visited Pigalle’s workshop, based at the Rue Saint-Lazare, in extensive grounds below the hill of Montmartre. Much like X Factor starlets staying at Simon Cowell’s LA mansion, Pigalle’s students caught a glimpse of the mega wealth artists could acquire.

On 11 May 1775, two months short of his eighteenth birthday, Tom was listed in the register of the school of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture as the ‘protégé par Jean-Baptiste Pigalle’.22*

Meanwhile, Paris was descending into turmoil. Riots over wheat prices erupted into a Flour War and thousands of troops stormed Paris’ streets to keep the peace. And a few months later, there was the terrible burning of Palais de la Cité, the royal residence in Paris. It was a city in which tensions seemed to erupt into violence at the slightest provocation. Tensions that would see regicide committed on the streets within two decades.

Blissfully unaware of the looming bloodbath and electrified by the thrill of public disorder, Tom lived in the ‘midst of its ever-varying gaieties’23: the capital was a place where the yearly average wine intake for a man was 300 litres. It was by good chance that he bumped into another young Londoner, Henry Angelo, who had been sent to Paris to refine his French and master the sword. Fresh out of Eton, Henry was the son of Domenico Angelo, the famous fencing master of Soho; Angelo senior seemed to be chums with ‘almost every artist of eminence, foreign as well as native, who practiced [in London] during the latter half of the last century’.24

In Henry, Tom found a kindred spirit. Together, they threw themselves into the closing act of Bourbon Paris: they ‘mixed in all societies; and [Tom], speaking French fluently, made himself acquainted with the habits of thinking, as well as those of acting, in that city, where everything, to an English eye, bore the appearance of burlesque’.25

Such bonhomiewas shared by Henry’s landlord, Charles Leviez, whose house on the Rue Battois became a bohemian hub for artists. Here, Tom was no doubt fast to pick up tips and titbits about the art world. Leviez had once been a much-admired dancer on the London stage and ballet-master on Drury Lane. Now he was a socialite, art dealer and full-time eccentric. He was known to dress up as Apollo, arrange nine chairs in a circle, pretending these were the Nine Muses of Greek Mythology, and perform his fiddle to them, ‘with the most extravagant grimaces’.26

While he wasn’t serenading his furniture, Leviez commissioned, collected and dealt in prints. And what’s more, many artists ‘frequently passed the evening at his house’, including Johann Georg Wille, Jacques Philippe Le Bas and Claude-Joseph Vernet.27 Even his wife, Madame Leviez, had modelled for Roubiliac commemorations in Westminster Abbey.

For Tom, the French capital provided a kaleidoscope of models displaying all forms of foible and incongruity: ‘Paris, as viewed under the old régime, opened a prolific source for his imitative powers. Nothing can exceed the fun and frolic which his subjects display, picked up amongst every class, from the court down to the cabaret.’28

One episode was a particular source of mirth. Remember Higginson,* the fellow student Tom picked up at Dover? He had taken a hotel on the Rue Battois, next to Charles Leviez’s house, where Henry was lodging. Higginson was another young Englishman who initially seemed like a good egg – until one incident: Suitgate.

Higginson sent a valet over to ask Henry whether he could borrow a black suit, ‘which he knew would fit him to a T’.29 Henry, being the decent sort of chap that he was, ‘readily consented’, on the agreement that it would be returned later that evening.

Higginson appeared ‘a pleasant companion, but, as it fell out, one who seemed to live upon his wits’. To Henry’s despair, Higginson went AWOL with the suit. ‘Rowlandson lost sight of him for two days and nights; on the morning of the third day he returned’.30 At this news, Henry barged into Higginson’s apartment. He was surprised to find Higginson was ‘seated under the frosting powder-puff of a French friseur, having his hair frizzled and powdered, à la mode’. As his hair was being curled, he threw a nonchalant ‘Ah! mon amie, is it you?’ to his inquisitor.31

And to Henry’s astonishment, not only was this a flagrant, unacceptable disregard for the offence already caused, as Higginson sat in this cloud of powder, he was still ‘in my mourning suit’.32

Tom, an onlooker to this spectacle, found great mirth in Suitgate, capturing it in a couple of drawings. And the indignation of his drinking companion uncovering the criminal red-handed was no doubt retold at any mention of the name Higginson thereafter.

Although the drawings are lost in the mists of time, they were described in Henry’s memoirs with fond musings and an astute perception into the artists’ progress. It was episodes such as this, abundant in hilarity and the folly of real life, that spurred Tom to experiment artistically, to break out from the considered methods of Academy teaching. He started to scribble down ‘subjects of real scenes’ in an ‘original, rapid manner’.33

Rowlandson’s trip to Paris was important. His eyes were opened to the swirling lines of the Rococo, the workshop of the greatest artist of the time and the day-to-day workings of the print trade. He ‘made rapid advances in the study of the human figure … and occasionally indulged that satirical talent, in portraying the characteristic of that fantastic people [the French] whose outré habits, perhaps, scarcely demanded the exaggerations of caricature.’34

But the Parisian excursion also gave Rowlandson a chance to grow up, to live without home comforts and make lifelong friends. Far from the gaze of Aunt Jane or the rules of the Academy, Rowlandson, with his new accomplice Henry Angelo, was free to indulge his personal desires and artistic curiosities.

A MODERN BOCCACCIO

By the end of 1776, Rowlandson was back on home turf in London. He’d grown into a tall, muscular, striking young man: ‘His person was a noticeable one; his features were regular and defined, his eye remarkably full and fearless, his glance being described as penetrating and suggestive of command; his mouth and chin expressed firmness and resolution.’35

His friendship with Angelo flourished in the playground of London; unsurprisingly, they had parted ways with Higginson. At the onset of Rowlandson’s twentieth birthday, two important changes occurred. The first was progressive to his education at the Academy: Tom was deemed eligible to enter life classes with female models. The other change was somewhat regressive to study: his friendship with Jack Bannister.

Jack, another import from Dr Barwis’ School, was the son of an acclaimed actor and singer, and as such his childhood had been spent between the stages of Covent Garden and Drury Lane. This exposure to theatrics was evident in his study at the Academy, where he was renowned for playing the fool. Jack was that loud one of the group, the first on the dance floor, the one who was terrific at accents and whose party trick was ridiculous impersonations. He could mimic anyone on request and had an ‘unaffected hilarity in conversation’.36 ‘Thomas Rowlandson, John Bannister, and myself … were inseparable companions,’37 recalled Henry Angelo, ‘the tales of these two gossips, told in one of those nights, each delectable to hear, would make a modern Boccaccio.’38*

The three bonded over a serious devotion to schoolboy tomfoolery. Their conversation was peppered with cheeky side-glances, ridiculous anecdotes and saucy double entendre. They were ‘the mutual advisers of each other’s studies, more frequently the prompters of each other’s tricks, to the great annoyance of poor old George Michael Moser, the keeper of the Academy’.39 The layout of the life classes set the scene to perfection. The artists, bunched together on curved benches, had every opportunity to indulge in an elbow nudge or roll their eyes at each other.

‘My friends Bannister and Rowlandson,’ Angelo recalled, ‘were students at the Royal Academy, at this period; and both being sprightly wights,* the [librarian] kept a watchful eye upon their pranks.’40 As Rowlandson made comic sketches, Bannister stirred the pot through comic performance: ‘The one was apt to engage the attention of the fellow disciples, by caricaturing the surly librarian; never forgetting to exaggerate his mulberry nose; whilst the other, born to figure in the histrionic art, a mimic by nature, used to divert them, in his turn.’41

Endeavour intended for the noble study of classical form was directed towards frightening teachers with ‘tragedy tricks’.42 On one occasion, most likely encouraged by his accomplices, Tom smuggled a pea-shooter into one of the life classes, which he fired at the female model to startle her out of her pose. While most of the room was consumed with mirth, Rowlandson narrowly escaped expulsion.

Bannister only lasted a couple of years at the Academy, his heart being in the world of theatre. This was a great relief to more diligent students, whose ‘joy arose avowedly from their being freed from an encumbrance on their grave pursuits’.43 And soon it was Rowlandson’s turn to wave goodbye to his student days. He stood at the crossroads of life, and a path needed to be chosen.

Rowlandson toyed with sculpture, following in the footsteps of Pigalle. He had potential here: he had been awarded a silver medal from the Academy for a clay replica of a bas-relief. And it could be lucrative, as portrait busts were all the rage with the belle monde of Georgian England.

But it was Rowlandson’s drawings that marked him out from the others. His ‘studies from the human figure at the Royal Academy, were made in so masterly a style’ that they were said to rival his teachers’ work.44 The pen, the burin and the etching needle were to be his weapons of choice.

And yet, there was an elephant in the sketching room. Sure, Rowlandson was capable. He was ‘indulged by the most eminent of the Royal Academicians and the French professors’ and his work was displayed ‘on the walls of the Royal Academy Exhibition without a break’.45 But his natural flair just didn’t cut the mustard in the Royal Academy’s world of prescribed tastes and established conventions. Although the Academy’s founder, Joshua Reynolds, claimed to be a rule breaker, writing that ‘every opportunity should be taken to discountenance that false and vulgar opinion, that rules are the fetters of genius’, his own stranglehold on the Academy simply replaced the old doctrine with a new one.

Rowlandson probably would have agreed with previous students who found the Academy a wash of ‘eternal blazonry, and tedious repetition of hackneyed, beaten subjects, either from the Scriptures, for the old ridiculous stories of heathen gods’.46 It was no place for a creative chap.

Like Jack Bannister, the master of mimicry, Rowlandson couldn’t help but see animation and vitality wherever he looked. While the rest of the world saw a diligent student focusing on work, Tom saw the perfect opportunity for a devilish prank. When Tom was instructed to sketch classical heroes from alabaster casts, he preferred to imagine them sneezing, hiccupping or snoring. Everywhere he looked, he saw a pantomimic panorama of life.

The ‘fecundity of [Rowlandson’s] invention’ with ‘his fancy so rich’, was producing ideas so surprising that ‘every species of composition flowed from his pen’.47 Perhaps Tom was inspired by his tutor, John Hamilton Mortimer, a leading figure in the Society of Artists. Mortimer’s work seemed to leap from the page, his subjects expressed through deft, sharp pen outlines, explosions of spiky dots and vibrant zigzag shading to create a cocktail of texture. Soon this energy was darting around the sketchbooks of his brilliant student, Tom Rowlandson.

But Rowlandson’s joie de vivre and energy of line didn’t sit happily in the rule of the Royal Academy. Tom’s ‘misfortune’ was that he was too imaginative, he had ‘too ready an invention … this rare faculty, strange as it may seem, however desirable to the poet, often proved the bane of the painter’.48

But this was no true misfortune. This would be the secret to Rowlandson’s success. No one could control his spirit, nor suppress his creative impulse. Once he had the confidence to break free from Reynolds’s rule book, Rowlandson and his accomplices would produce art in a more unhinged, wild, raucous, deliberate manner than had ever been seen before.

A SPOT OF FISHING

How Tom progressed next can perhaps best be explained through an episode entirely of my own imagination – but it is entirely possible, nonetheless.

Maybe, dear reader, you are lying in bed, an awkward crick in your neck as you strive to read this book. Perhaps you’re on the lido deck of a cruise ship in the western Mediterranean. Perhaps you’re on a packed train, pushed up against another sweaty commuter. Wherever you are, it’s time to leave the realms of your current reality. I’m taking your hand; there are now pink swirls of smoke filling your vision. Xylophone scales fill your ears to herald that we are stepping back in time to 1778.

As the smoke clears, we find ourselves in the Old Bell on Fleet Street, a pub built a century before by Christopher Wren for his masons working at St Paul’s. It’s pretty dingy, but the mood is jolly. The tolls of Wren’s church bells are muffled by guffaws of laughter and frank conversation thrown backwards and forwards between the wooden piers, which support the low, beamed ceiling. A spaniel sniffs around the scuffed boots on the uneven stone floor. Stop fretting! No one will see you in your swimming costume. We’re just spectres, you see, invisible. Now, pay attention to those two young men taking a pew furthest from the door. These are our friends Thomas Rowlandson and Jack Bannister:

‘Hang on a sec, Rowly,’ pipes up Bannister. ‘Who’s that chap?’

Rowlandson guffaws. ‘Oh! That sour-looking fellow in the corner? Let’s call him over,’ he says with a mischievous wink: ‘Good day, sir, pull up a chair over here!’

‘I’ve got business to attend in—’ the stranger replies.

‘I say! I know who you are. You’re one of the new intake, aren’t you! I saw it on the lists today, nine new students and at the bottom read Gilly or Gillweed or Gulliver or something strange. And then “21 next August”, with a big swirly signature of Sir J. I’m right, aren’t I! Am I right? Am I, Gillyweed?’

‘Quite right, I’m afraid. My name is Gillray. James Gillray.’

‘Go on, then, Gilly, which bit of the Academy are you in?’

‘I’m not quite sure yet. I submitted quite a shabby drawing of a plaster cast, which the committee seemed to think was all right, and now I’m down for etching.’

‘An etcher, then, Gillweed.’

‘Gillray – actually – Gillray. It means “ruddy-faced”. It’s a Highland term.’

‘You’re Scottish then? Oh, Charlie, can we have another of these ales – and one for Master Gillray.’

‘I’ve always lived in London, but my father was from a hamlet just south of Edinburgh. Lanarkshire, beautiful rolling, wild hills around there, you know? He was a blacksmith, working with his hands and all, but enlisted like they all do. A private he was, in the royal cavalry. He lost his right arm fighting at Fontenoy and it must have been – let’s see – 1746 when the muster roll would have marked him joining the Chelsea Hospital. Then a couple of years later, along I came.’

‘Hang on a minute, don’t sound so bleak about it all. Jolly noble to have fought at Fontenoy.’

‘It’s not bleak, it’s just the truth. It’s hard not to be bleak when your parents are Moravians.’ At the blank expressions of his companions, he continues. ‘The Moravian Brotherhood is one of the strictest Protestant sects. From the age of five, I was sent to Bedford to be cocooned from the corrupting influences of the world – from places like this tavern. Damn nasty place, that school. When my brother died, they all celebrated, because it meant that he was to join the Saviour. It means I’ve been trained to see depravity and guilt wherever I look.’

‘And now you’re at the Academy, staring at naked flesh all day and indulging in the evening. What would all those Moravian brothers say to that?’

‘—or what would they say to last night, eh? Henry Angelo falling in the river?’

‘—or when we hijacked that sedan chair on Fleet Street!’

‘—and fell out in a tumble of lace!’

While Rowlandson and Bannister have been batting their ­stories of misdemeanour and anecdote back and forth, they’ve failed to notice that their new acquaintance James Gillray has slipped away. All that is left is a sketch, on Henry’s copy of the Tatler, just below details of the daily orders of Queen Charlotte.

‘Look at that, Rowly! He was sketching us all along. That’s you, knocking the stool over. The likeness is uncanny – he’s captured the way your lip curls up.’

‘Yes, and look he’s given you a bulbous nose – it seems even more like you than you are yourself,’ retorts Bannister.

The sketch is indeed of Rowlandson and Bannister in animated conversation. There’s no mistaking the identity of the sitters. But the lines spiral and zigzag and cross and dart to warp them in a comic contortion. And in a neat, serifed hand, the young men notice it is labelled.

‘And look here, Rowly, a caption: UPROAR!’

Reader, we have indulged long enough. I must tear you away from this cosy scene to return through that pink dreamlike haze back to the sun deck of Symphony on the Seas, or the delights of the London Underground escalator queue.

It might have been a surprise to Rowlandson to know that it was Gillray, this sheepish, reclusive first-year student, who would be his greatest ally and, one day, outshine him. Although they seemed to be polar opposites in nature, creatively they would tread very similar paths. The insuppressibly creative spirit of these fellows would produce art in a more wild, raucous, deliberate manner than had ever been seen before. These Piccadilly Mad Men were to become an acerbic and dangerous tool to outwit and outmanoeuvre the Royal Academy itself.

* There was probably some double entendrehere. ‘Old Rowley’ was well-known as the lustful stallion of King Charles II – a nickname that was also given to the King himself, and probably hinted at his many mistresses and illegitimate children.

* Tiny paintings on a white enamel canvas.

* Unfortunately, his name was misspelled as ‘Rolanson’.

* There is no record of Higginson’s first name. I’d take a guess at Philip.

* Boccaccio was a fourteenth-century Italian author, most famous for The Decameron, a story of seven young women and three young men who escape to a secluded villa just outside Florence to escape the Black Death. They each tell ten of the juiciest stories they can think of, dotted with practical jokes, tales of wit and, most notably, erotic love. The New Yorker considered it ‘probably the dirtiest great book in the Western canon’ – so it would have been well received by Rowlandson and his gang, no doubt.

* A ‘wight’ meant an ordinary living human being, although it’s now used more in the realm of fantasy to describe a mythical, immortal being.

2

Putrid Masquerades and Twittery

BRIGHT WAS THEIR STEEL

Just north of London’s Trafalgar Square is St Martin’s Lane. Today, it’s the heart of Theatreland, throbbing with thesps hurrying between stage doors, rickshaws blasting out music, and tourists with a programme in one hand and a cocktail in the other. But this was once home to the great hub of London’s artistic scene: Old Slaughter’s Coffee House. Old Slaughter’s was the haunt of architects, painters, poets and sculptors, where Hogarth, Gainsborough and Roubiliac were part of the throng. For the price of a penny, you could drink coffee, learn the news of the day, and gossip over a game of chess, draughts or whist.

By 1780, Old Slaughter’s was still a centre for students and teachers of the Royal Academy – Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray may well have dropped in on the way to lectures. A fly on the wall may have spied 23-year-old Gillray, with his ink-stained hands and bag of sketching tools, picking up one of the seventeen newspapers published in London every week.

Among the murmur of coffee-fuelled conversation, Gillray might have scanned the Westminster Chronicle,inked to the seams in lines and lines of Caslon font. He may have flitted over reports of a young sea captain, Horatio Nelson, sailing the seas from Jamaica in command of the 28-gun HMS Hinchinbrook, two brigs, three sloops, the transport Penelope and a tender, the Royal George. Or, had Gillray perused the British Mercury, he may have turned to the letters page, where epistolaries were frothing with despair at the Tory prime minister, Lord North – would he stand in the elections the coming autumn? Some columns might touch on the latest from the Protestant Association, arguing against the new laws that would enable Catholics to join the British Army and plot treason – a bubbling anger that would soon erupt in the violence of the Gordon Riots later that summer. And if Gillray had picked up the Tatler, he might have darted over the latest write-ups from the theatre at Drury Lane, describing a sparky debut from Joseph Grimaldi, who would one day become the most popular comic entertainer in England.

But one piece of news would have particularly dilated the pupils of young James: the announcement of the twelfth Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts to be held in the new exhibition space in Somerset House. Coffee-house lizards could have guessed this piece of news would pique interest in Gillray: he was so obviously a second-year student from the Academy. The tell-tale signs were there: satchel, pencils, ink-stained fingers, and notebook at hand, ready to be whipped out to sketch unsuspecting caffeine addicts. But while this specimen, insular and alone, seemed to blend in seamlessly with the London coffee house scene, his roots lay far from St Martin’s Lane. James Gillray had ended up in London by mistake.

The Gillray story began on 11 May 1745 in a muddy field outside Belgium: a bloodbath known as the Battle of Fontenoy. This was a major engagement in the War of the Austrian Succession, where an allied force of English, Austrian and Dutch soldiers were crushingly defeated by the French. Out of the 100,000 men who started the day on the field, by sunset, a fifth were dead or wounded. The Irish poet, Thomas Osborne Davis, captured the moment in verse:

Bright was their steel, ’tis bloody now, their guns are filled with gore;

Through shattered ranks and severed files the trampled flags they tore;

The English strove with desperate strength, paused, rallied, staggered, fled–

The green hill-side is matted close with dying and with dead.1

One of the staggering troops fighting under England’s banner was a blacksmith named James Gillray, a Calvinist from Edinburgh assigned to the Queen’s Dragoons. He’d got away lightly: he only lost his right arm and lived to tell the tale. But it was the end of his army career. On 15 March 1746, he ended up at the only place he could find help: the Royal Chelsea Hospital where he would join the Chelsea Pensioners. At this time, Chelsea was a small village on the north bank of the Thames, about two miles south-west of central London.

And so it was that this one-armed Scotsman began his next chapter. He found a loving wife, Jane Coleman, from Longhope, Gloucestershire, and together they settled into London life.

Get involved with the community, they say, when you move to a new area. Get stuck in. Make a few friends. Have a bit of fun. But this one-armed Scotsman didn’t heed such advice. James and Jane Gillray moved into a terraced cottage at 26 Milman’s Row, which backed on to the Moravian chapel, where Mr Gillray became a sexton. He had joined the most depressing gang in town: the local Moravian Church on Fetter Lane.

The Moravians were an earnest bunch. If they came to a party, they would reliably kill the vibe. For them, the glass was always half empty, never half full. For a pillar of Moravian faith was one depressing belief: the essential, unavoidable, terrible depravity of mankind. Mr and Mrs Gillray, as devout Moravians, regarded the world with acute cynicism (they would have been good at risk assessments), to the extent that they considered life on earth as worthless. They taught their children to welcome death as a glorious release from earthly bondage, to desire passionately to not recover from illness. When one son, Johnny, became ill with a fatal fever, his dying words were: ‘Pray don’t keep me! O let me go, I must go!’2

The death of a young child was to fall upon the Gillray family four times. Only one reached maturity: James, the 23-year-old student now sitting in Old Slaughter’s Coffee House.

In 1762, when he was just five, young Gillray was sent to a Moravian boarding school in Bedford. He stayed for a couple of years until the school closed, at which point he was probably brought back to Chelsea, where his parents led a strict regime. This only child was banned from playing games and obligated to live a life of introspection. Despite their rather serious outlook on life, the Moravians were firm believers in a rigorous education: James grew up to be ‘an extremely well-informed and widely read man’, who was familiar with classical allegory and political theory.3

It was clear from the start that James had artistic prowess. At the age of nine, he made a beautiful sketch of a goldfinch, labelled: ‘James Gillray. The first bird he did draw and paint.’ At fourteen, he was sent to work as an apprentice for Henry Ashby, engraving buttons and business cards.

Here, Gillray was taught the techniques of etching: ‘Many a choice specimen of penmanship was copied by young Gillray, in sweeping flourishes on the copper.’4 A fellow apprentice considered ‘the early part of [Gillray’s] life might be compared to the spider’s, busied in spinning of lines’.5 But it was a stifling environment, where only ‘rich curving lines’ were allowed.6 Any ‘ornamental knots and sprigs’ were strictly out of the question. It is hard to imagine any arty teenage boys being excited by ‘this mechanical drudgery’.7 Indeed, like Rowlandson doodling away in his school textbooks, Gillray left us ‘certain humorous scraps which he sketched on the borders of the examples of round hand and text’.8

Bird nestling, James Gillray.

By permission of the British Library, London. Ref. BL7283261.

By his late teens, James Gillray packed the apprenticeship in. Perhaps it was living with his strict parents. Perhaps it was the prospect of a career drawing lines on business cards. Perhaps it was London itself. His thirst for life, adventure and excitement was close to bursting. This was his moment of teenage rebellion. A time to loiter around gin shops, or dabble in cockfighting, or visit a few of the Soho brothels – just because he could. The story goes that he ran away with a few of the other apprentices to join a troupe of strolling players.*

Like many gap years, it’s a mystery what happened in these months. But he clearly got some teenage angst out of his system. In 1778, he returned to London with a foot wedged in the heavy door of the Royal Academy Schools. He took classes in anatomy, drawing, painting and engraving from prestigious artists such as Benjamin West, Giovanni Cipriani and Francesco Bartolozzi.

It was the Italian artist Bartolozzi whose work piqued Gillray’s interest. Brilliant Bart was considered a real trailblazer: a man who tore up the rule book. While the engraving world worked with black inks, brazen Bart had worked with red, orange and brown, creating softness and shading. And what’s more, this wild Italian didn’t work in line, as was de rigueur, he created engravings using his ‘stipple technique’. Like the Pointillists after him, blazing Bart used delicate dots to create the illusion of shading.

Under Bart’s wing, Gillray worked towards a career as a serious engraver, reproducing the great portraits and history paintings of the day. Gillray’s ‘eccentric humour displayed itself; for during his studies in that school of super-Italian softness and elegance, verging on beautiful insipidity, did he display the rudiments of that daring species of dramatic design, that extraordinary graphic hyperbole, which almost met in its highest flights the outposts of the creations of Michael Angelo.’9

TWO PENNY WORTH OF CABBAGE LEAVES

By 1780, Gillray was well integrated in Reynolds’s educational scheme. And as he perused the papers in Old Slaughter’s, a few snippets of chit-chat may have made their way through the haze of caffeine: ‘The new space is absolutely tip-top you know … it’s going to be the best one yet … I’ve heard Sir Joshua is over the moon …’

The summer of 1780 was indeed a watershed moment for the Royal Academy: they had a swanky new venue. There had been a growing perception that London had no great public buildings, that important societies and departments were hidden away, dotted in alleys and lanes that didn’t befit their importance. It was Edmund Burke, an Irish-born Whig MP, who led the campaign for some sort of ‘national building’, and in 1775 Parliament passed an act for ‘erecting and establishing Publick Offices in Somerset House’.10 Sir William Chambers set to work on this plot of land between the Strand and the Thames, and it wasn’t long before a grand tribute to the Palladian style sprung up. This was for the use of, amongother things, the Salt Office, the Stamp Office, the Tax Office, the Navy Office, the Navy Victualling Office, the Publick Lottery Office, the Hawkers and Pedlar Office and the Royal Academy of Arts.

The Royal Academy made its new home in the North Wing of Somerset House. The Exhibition Room was at the top of a steep winding staircase. The 32-feet high, top-lit, purpose-built room was considered ‘undoubtedly at the date, the finest gallery for displaying pictures so far built’.11

Exhibition Room, Somerset House, Thomas Rowlandson, 1808.