Showing, Telling, Seeing: Exhibiting South Asia in Britain, 1900–Now
The Great Spectacle Director of Studies Mark Hallett invites PMC Notes readers to see The Great Spectacle exhibition at the Royal Academy this summer. Sometimes, you can really tell when artists have enjoyed themselves. This must have been the case, surely, when Thomas Rowlandson produced the image that adorns the cover of this issue of PMC Notes. In this typically lively and deftly drawn work, which he made sometime around 1815, the famous satirist wryly lampoons a clutch of visitors to the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition at Somerset House. The Academy’s exhibition, packed to the rafters with paintings, sculptures, and drawings, and thronged with people, was the central event of the British art world in his period, and was lauded by its admirers as a symbol of Britain’s artistic and cultural sophistication. Rowlandson takes a very different, far more mischievous view of the exhibition, and, more particularly, of its visitors, whom he transforms into a comic assembly: we see, amongst others, a grotesquely corpulent gentleman, a red-faced cleric, stooping connoisseurs (their bottoms perfectly in sync), an overdressed matron and two beautiful young women, the latter of whom smile, pink-cheeked, as they look at a wall of paintings adorned with a female nude. It is easy to imagine that Rowlandson had a smile on his face as he drew: look, for instance, at the way he uses these visitors’ mouths and jaws to suggest their babbling conversation and ignorant gawping—this is an image that revels in lolling and puckered lips, slack and darting tongues, and a parade of lurching and retreating chins.
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Detail of Thomas Rowlandson, Viewing at the Royal Academy, ca. 1815, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
