Watercolor with pen and brown ink over graphite; verso: watercolor blots on medium, moderately textured, cream wove paper
Dimensions:
Sheet: 7 3/4 x 6 inches (19.7 x 15.2 cm)
Credit Line:
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Copyright Status:
Public Domain
Accession Number:
B1977.14.368
Gallery Label:
This drawing is one of Rowlandson’s occasional forays into portraiture, although whether it portrays an actual sitter or a caricature type is debatable. While he sports a fashionable top hat and coat, the cove’s face is battered and distorted into a vision of ugliness, his hat is worn at a disreputable angle, and a leer plays upon his lips. Rowlandson invites the viewer to see him as an aging and disreputable dandy. The cove’s physical ugliness is equated to moral degeneracy, a commonplace in an age that paid serious regard to physiognomy, the “science” that taught one to determine a person’s character from facial features. Gallery label for Great British Watercolors from the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art (Yale Center for British Art, 2008-06-09 - 2008-08-17)
