Ribald "Rowly"

England's 18th Century master of graphic razz and uproar, Caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson, last week enlivened the Boston art scene: some 100 selected Rowlandsons hung on the walls of the Boston Public Library. They came from the Library's Albert H. Wiggin* Collection of Prints, Drawings, and Books--one of the world's finest.

The Boston Library did not hang some of its more raffish Rowlandson items. But the show contained such characteristic works as At Close Range, a deft landscape containing a stray huntsman spying on a lover's embrace, and the farcical Pig in a Poke, in which a juicy porker tries to escape pursuing humanity through the heavy legs of an equally porcine woman.

Few if any caricaturists have excelled lusty, free-swinging Thomas Rowlandson in the lampooning of social manners. Lacking the brutal bite of Hogarth and Goya, he yet thoroughly impaled many of the affectations and stupidities of his period. Prolific "Rowly" was born in London in 1756 of a prosperous merchant father and a French mother. His conventional schooling was followed by a year at the Royal Academy, two years of happy, standard artist's life in Paris (bills footed by a rich French aunt).

Dr. Syntax. In his spare time, Rowlandson became a great London swell. Extra money for gambling debts could the always be leading had print from publisher Rudolph of the Ackermann, time. For Ackermann, Rowlandson illustrated the popular satirical picture book Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque. (Today a Rowlandson-illustrated first edition has brought as much as $3,100 from book collectors.)

Writes English Esthete Osbert Sitwell: "The faces he shows us often appear at first sight as the faces of a delirium; and then, horror on horror, one discovers that they are to be encountered every day in street and newspaper."

* The pre-depression chairman of the Chase National Bank gave the collection to the Library in 1941.

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