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Rowlandson’s portrayal of an audience at the theater captures the culture of display and spectatorship that lay at the heart of eighteenth-century social life (Brewer, 1995, p. 348). Few of these spectators have actually come to watch the play. Instead they are busy studying one another and being scrutinized by figures in the surrounding boxes. Because light levels in auditoriums were not dimmed during performances, London’s crowded theaters provided an ideal venue for this sport of seeing and being seen. Rowlandson was himself a regular habitué of the playhouse; his friend Jack Bannister was a leading comic actor who regularly performed at Drury Lane. Although this scene has been identified as the remodeled Drury Lane that opened in 1775, the architecture does not quite tally, making this a more generic scene of London theater life. These theatergoers occupy the first gallery level of the auditorium, a zone reserved for the polite middling orders of society. Here young gallants try their luck with the seated ladies, a practice described in a contemporary epilogue that was often delivered from the stage to close a night’s entertainment. Thomas King (“Bucks Have at Ye All,” 1768) described the gallery as “The ‘Middle Row’, whose keener Views of Bliss Are chiefly centr’d in a fav’rite Miss; A set of jovial Bucks who there resort, flushed from the Tavern—reeling ripe for Sport—Whisp’ring soft Nonsense in the fair One’s Ear, And wholly ignorant—what passes here” (Pedicord, 1980, p. 247). By dispensing with a clear narrative, Rowlandson allows for an endless range of possible plots for this human drama in the theater, something he may have learned from studying French painting on trips to France. Such open-endedness infuses the scene with an erotic charge and invites the viewer to become a fellow gallery lounger, flirting with the surrounding company in a playful exchange of glances.

Matthew Hargraves

John Baskett, Paul Mellon's Legacy: a Passion for British Art: Masterpieces from the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 2007, pp. 272-73, no. 64, pl. 64, N5220 M552 P38 2007 OVERSIZE (YCBA)

Rowlandson frequently depicted the interiors of Drury Lane and Convent Garden, which were the only two London theaters granted full patents as "royal theatres" by the Licensing Act of 1737. Theater-going was a relatively inexpensive and popular pastime in eighteenth-century Britain, and was enjoyed by a wide cross-section of the public. Theophilus Cibber, the song of the famous actor-playwright and former Drury lane proprietor Colley Cibber, noted: "Noble, Gentle, or Simple, who fill the Boxes, Pit, and Galleries…as K-ng, L-rds and COMMONS…make the great body of the Nation." The theatrical portrait became a popular genre, and images of actors, usually in character, were widely circulated through engravings (see cat. 8). Theaters, concert-halls, and opera houses were important social centers, and the fashionable attended to meet their friends and acquaintances, observe their enemies, and to be seen by the public. This practice evidently annoyed more serious theater-goers, including an anonymous writer in the Theatrical Monitor of 1768, who complained to testily: During the time of the representation of a play, the quality in the boxes are totally employed in finding out, and beckoning to their acquaintances, male and female; they criticize on fashions, whisper cross the benches, make significant nods, and give hints of this and that, and t'other body. In this watercolor Rowlandson slyly played on the performative aspect of theater-going, by depicting the audience as if they were actors in a play, and placing the viewer in the role of the spectator.

Gillian Forrester


Wilcox, Forrester, O'Neil, Sloan. The Line of Beauty: British Drawings and Watercolors of the Eighteenth Century. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 2001. pg. 107., cat. no. 88, N5220 M552 P38 2007 OVERSIZE (YCBA)