Rowlandson and the Royal Academy Summer Show.

BACK WHEN the Royal Academy was a force to be reckoned with, Sir Joshua Reynolds sternly ad-vised the students in its painting and sculpture schools that 'there is an art of animating and dignifying figures with intellectual grandeur, of impressing the appearance of philosophick wisdom, or heroic virtue.'
 
Reynolds was still President of the Royal Academy when the young Thomas Rowlandson, a lively and talented 15-year-old, enrolled as a student there. Rowlandson never made it to RA status, and you can see why. There is little point in looking to his The Swing, or Rural Sports - part of a small but absorbing Row-landson exhibition currently at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge - for much in the way of philosophick wisdom or heroic grandeur.
 
This is Rowlandson's pastiche of Fragonard's jokily erotic masterpiece, The Swing (now in the Wallace Collection), its delicate Rococo account of love among the foliage redone to suit cruder tastes. A buxom wench, skirts flying, swings from a rope slung between two of Rowlandson's characteristic, gnarled trees; she is ogled from below by a gaggle of leering, potato-featured grotesques, a rogues' gallery of voyeurs. Their extreme excitement is partly to be explained by the fact that underwear was not generally worn in the late eighteenth century.
 
When Rowlandson was a student at the RA, according to his friend Henry Angelo, he 'gave great of-fence by carrying a peashooter into the life academy.' After the professor of drawing had arranged the model, 'Rowlandson let fly a pea, which making her start, she threw herself out of position, and interrupted the gravity of the study for the whole evening. For this offence, Master Rowlandson went near to getting himself expelled.'
 
While Reynolds was out to raise standards,...

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