Lot 8

THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN THOMAS ROWLANDSON (1756-1827) THE COMFORTS OF BATH The following three lots are from a group of watercolours by Rowlandson caricaturing the society and activities of the fashionable late 18th Century spa resort of Bath. The group centres round the set of twelve aquatints by Rowlandson, published as The Comforts of Bath by S.W. Forbes on 6 January 1798. These have been linked to the publication the same year of Christopher Anstey's The New Bath Guide; or, Memoirs of the Blunderhead Family (first published in 1766), but the aquatints were not acutally published with quotations from Anstey's verses until 1868. Some of the designs have also been linked with the episode of the visit of Matthew Bramble, his sister and entourage to Bath in Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker, published in 1771, but Rowlandson's illustrations to this book are a completely different series, first used for an edition of 1793. What is probably true is that such accounts of Bath, and the general Bath mania of the time, influenced Rowlandson in his choice of subject for a whole group of watercolours executed in the 1790s, some of which formed the basis of the Comforts of Bath aquatints in 1798; many subjects exist in more than one version. (For what is probably the fullest account of the complex story of these Rowlandsons, see J. Riely, Rowlandson Drawings from the Paul Mellon Collection, exhibition catalogue, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 16 November 1977 - 15 January 1978 and Royal Academy, London, 4 March - 21 May 1978, pp.31-90; four examples from the Mellon Collection are reproduced in J. Baskett and D. Snelgrove, The Drawings of Thomas Rowlandson in the Paul Mellon Collection, 1977, nos.297-306.) As well as the ten watercolours from the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, there are seven in the Victoria Art Gallery, Bath; three others were sold at Christie's London, on 8 July 1986, and further individual watercolours exist in other collections.

Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827)

The Concert, Bath Chambers

Details

Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827)
The Concert, Bath Chambers
pencil, pen and ink and watercolour
4¼ x 7 1/8in. (10.8 x 18.1cm.)

Provenance

Anon. sale, Christie's London, 13 November 1990, lot 106 (£9,000).

Lot Essay

This composition is related to pl.II of the Comforts of Bath aquatints, though that was probably based on a version in the William A. Farnworth Library and Art Gallery, Rockland, Maine; another version is one of the group in the Paul Mellon Collection (see Riely, op.cit., p.34, under no.44).
According to the 'Description' by the first owner of the Mellon drawings, Sir James Winter Lake (circa 1745-1807), 3rd Bart., the singer is Madame Mara; Gertrud Elisabeth Mara (1749-1833) was a celebrated German soprano, who performed in England between 1784 and 1802.

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