The Auction
I
The auction began at noon on Monday, June 23rd, 1828. It was held at the house of Mr. Samuel Leigh Sotheby at 13 Wellington Street, Strand, and it continued there for four consecutive days.[i] Samuel knew his business. His grandfather John Sotheby had founded the company years before, specializing in the sale of libraries. They had auctioned off the libraries of some of the most famous men of the eighteenth century: Joseph Addison, John Wilkes, Charles Talleyrand, and Napoleon Bonaparte, among them. They had also auctioned off some of the century’s most impressive collections: the Earl of Bute’s botanical works, Richard Southgate’s coins and shells, and Dr. Walker’s surgical instruments. The expansion into the sale of fine art followed as a matter of course. After all, men of taste collected prints and drawings with the same enthusiasm that they collected everything else, from the rarest of incunabula to common plants and insects.[ii] In 1802, Sotheby’s sold the English portraits belonging to the late Samuel Tyssen, a collection so extensive that it took fifteen days to disperse. They had also auctioned Thomas Sandby’s estate in 1799 and Henri Fuseli’s in 1825. The house on Wellington Street, to which they had moved in 1818, was spacious enough to permit viewing before the auction, and Samuel saw to it that the catalogues were always available well before the events. Indeed, the catalogues were extremely important, not only as a kind of advertisement, but also as an interpretive exercise by which the experts at Sotheby’s could highlight the merits of individual pieces and the value of the collection as a whole.[iii] For the
auction that Monday in June, the title page was not particularly unusual: “A Catalogue of the Valuable Collection of Prints, Drawings & Pictures of the Late Distinguished Artist, Thomas Rowlandson, Esq., So well known for the Humour and Spirit of his Pencil, and the Original Designer of Doctor Syntax, Johnny Quae Genus, Vicar of Wakefield, Dance of Death, Dance of Life, etc.” Not one to waste either space or opportunity, Sotheby continued well past the obligations of title, highlighting first the availability of Rowlandson’s own drawings–“his most celebrated Subjects, many of them the Originals”–before emphasizing also “Fine Etchings by Rembrandt,” “A Large Collection of the Works of Rubens,” and “Valuable Paintings By Andrea del Sarto, Pordonone, Paris Bordone, Marco Ricci, Vernet, Vandyke, Teniers, etc.” Even making allowances for hyperbole, the “Valuable Collection” described on the title page appears curiously at odds with the reputation of the deceased. For an artist so well known for his irreverent good humor, for an artist so resolutely commercial, so long wedded to the cheap and the popular rather than the expensive and the elite, a private collection of this size–the thirty-seven-page catalogue, the 528 lots, the almost 8000 individual items–is surprising in and of itself. That the collection would feature Rembrandt, Rubens, del Sarto, and Van Dyke, among others, is simply astounding.
Rowlandson had passed away on April 21st, 1827, twelve weeks before his seventieth birthday and more than a year before Sotheby’s auction.[iv] Although the title page chooses to remember him first and foremost as an book illustrator–the “Original Designer of Doctor Syntax,” etc.–he had been for many years an artist of diverse talents and extraordinary productivity. In fact, he had been a presence in the London art world from his student days at the Royal Academy in the late 1770s up until the onset of his final illness in1825, if not always traveling in the highest of circles. He had begun his career in oils and sculpture before almost immediately switching over to
watercolors, which he exhibited at Academy Exhibitions to great acclaim throughout the 1780s. He was also, together with his friend James Gillray, one of England’s greatest and most prolific of political caricaturists. He began in the early 1780s, at first mocking Charles Fox and Lord North and then delighting Londoners during the famous Westminster Election of 1784, for which he produced a print, sometimes two, every day for weeks. Although Gillray would emerge as the undisputed master of political caricature–creating larger and more ingenious prints throughout the 1790s–Rowlandson continued to exploit the political absurdities of his day and maintained a steady stream of anti-Napoleon propaganda until well after the battle of Waterloo in 1815. Throughout the same period, he worked for two very different printsellers, Rudolph Ackermann, whose shop on the Strand was well-known for its high-end products and well-bred clientele, and Thomas Tegg, in Cheapship, who preferred grotesqueries of a more low-brow sort. With Ackermann’s encouragement, Rowlandson had collaborated with William Henry Pyne and Auguste Putin on The Microcosm of London, an elaborate production that appeared in an expensive three-volume set between 1808 and 1810. Ackermann also published Rowlandson’s most famous collaboration, The Three Tours of Doctor Syntax (1812-21). There, the artist worked with poet William Combe on a
lighted hearted satire of the period’s fascination with the picturesque. For ThomasTegg, on the other hand, Rowlandson indulged a penchant for ruder and cruder social satire. He did many of the prints for The Caricature Magazine (1808-1821), The Prime Jest Book (1811-12), and The Prime Song Book (1821), and numerous others that pushed satire into one kind of obscenity or another. It may have been for Tegg, or it may have been at his own initiative, that Rowlandson produced a series of prints whose graphic sexuality makes them by modern standards almost pornographic. As a result of his agreement with Ackermann and Tegg, Rowlandson was able to stay busy at both ends of the
market, producing a huge variety of original drawings and watercolors that were also sold as individual prints before being collected into colored plate books and sold again. A quick glance at an admittedly incomplete list of such books reveals thirty-three titles before 1800 and seventy-nine after.[v] Among others, Rowlandson illustrated novels by Fielding and Goldsmith and Smollett and Sterne, documented his own tours to Cornwall and Wales, and contributed to books on such diverse subjects as fencing, horsemanship, dancing, hunting, politics, and travel. Interestingly, not a single one of the these colored plate books was to be found among the “Valuable Collection” sold that week.
The 528 lots that comprised Sotheby’s four-day auction were assembled and organized with great care. Items went into lots, lots were grouped into categories (by artist or genre or nationality), categories were arranged by days, and days succeeded one another with a logic that was careful to attract and encourage prospective buyers. A significant portion of the almost 8000 items were by Rowlandson himself, and each day included a large section given over to his prints and drawings. That Monday, for example, Sotheby divided the first 121 lots into five categories totaling almost 1400 individual items. The categories were in order: “English School”; “Dutch Etchings”; “Rembrandt”; “Early German Masters”; and “Drawings of the Late T. Rowlandson.” The “Rembrandt” section had the fewest items at 49, while the others varied between 200 and 400 each. Although Rowlandson possessed a number of fine books of prints, which were sold in the last section of Day Three, his own illustrated books were absent from this auction because Sotheby had decided to respect the boundary between book and picture and sell them off elsewhere. Without identifying where the books had come from, he put them into the library sale of one, Burges Bryan, from Monmouth, making it impossible to know for sure which, and how many, of the books had actually belonged to Rowlandson.[vi] This small oddity–that Sotheby would on his title page tout a “Distinguished Artist” best known for his illustrated books, which were then purposively omitted from the sale–is perfectly in keeping with both the boundaries of genre and the practice of the auction house, but it reminds us nonetheless of the difficulties of understanding what a “collection” might actually mean, both in the specific instance of the Rowlandson sale and in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries generally. We want to know what is it that these particular pictures, by these particular artists, sold at this particular auction, might actually tell us about Thomas Rowlandson and the world to which he belonged. But we also have to recognize how difficult it is to ascribe intention, to know why this picture was included and that not, to understand what value may have been bestowed on which object by an owner for whom certain pictures may have been dearly beloved, others professionally useful, still others part of an inventory that was yet to be sold. It is precisely these challenges, however, that highlight the richness of the historical moment. As if to offer encouragement, Sotheby left behind his own copy of the auction catalogue. Penned in the margins is the record of who bought which lot and for how much. Marc Antonio Raimondi’s engraving after Raphael, The Virgin Weeping Over Christ, fetched L11 10s, the most paid for any print. According to the catalogue, it had been in the collection of Pierre-Jean Mariette, the famous Parisian dealer and connoisseur. A large folio of Rowlandson drawings, numbering over six hundred items, went to a Mr. Walker for L23 15s. The single most expensive item was a Van Dyke painting, Our Saviour and Mary Magdalen, which went on the last day to Mr. Collings for L32 9s. The careful arithmetic at the end of Sotheby’s copy shows that when all was said and done the “Valuable Collection . . . of the Late Distinguished Artist, Thomas Rowlandson, Esq.,” brought exactly L564 16s.
In the days before public libraries and public museums, private “collections” were far more common than they are today. Today, artifacts are collected–whether they be books or paintings or bottle caps or baseball cards–primarily for the amusement, often for the prestige, of the collector. In the eighteenth century, without easy, convenient access to public repositories, men and women of taste and means collected artifacts as a way of knowing, and staying connected to, the truth of the world and of one’s self. The British Museum began as a public institution when, several years before Rowlandson’s birth, Sir Hans Sloane offered his extensive collection of books, manuscripts, prints, drawings, flora, fauna, coins, and medals to George II as a gift to the nation.[vii] Over the course of Rowlandson’s lifetime, other collectors followed suit until, in 1823, George IV, in a magnanimous gesture, donated his father’s library to the Museum. That gift brought with it the new buildings on Great Russell Street, which opened the same year that Rowlandson died. The word “collection” thus asserted itself in the late eighteenth century more forcefully than it does today: not only was it synonymous with the cultural identity of the owner, but it also evoked the power of its own organizing principals, representing enlightenment rationality as palpable truth. Sometimes that truth derived from the artifacts collected–Roman coins, Greek statues, Old Master prints–sometimes from the taste of the person who was doing the collecting–William Hamilton, Horace Walpole, Charles Townley, Richard Payne Knight–and most often, of course, from a combination of both. Always that power was augmented by size: the bigger the collection the more assertive the claim to truth or knowledge or beauty or whatever particular ideal the collection was trying to represent. When Sotheby used the phrase “Valuable Collection,” he wanted to evoke just such authority. He wanted to bestow upon the “The Valuable Collection of Prints, Drawings & Pictures of the Late Distinguished Artist, Thomas Rowlandson, Esq.,” an authority that would advertise itself and increase the bottom line.
But there was no denying that Sotheby’s auction was also an estate sale, a selling off of possessions no longer needed by the deceased and no longer wanted by the descendants. Under these circumstances a “collection” becomes simply what’s left over when all has been said and done, after the trivial items have been removed, after the last gifts have been made, after the body has been laid to rest. These objects are “collected” by the fact of their owner’s death and brought to auction to be transformed by the forces of the marketplace. For the beneficiaries of the estate, the collection is being transformed back into the medium–money–from which it originally came. For everyone else, the transformation is very different, a violent dismemberment and dispersal that enacts the very force that collections sought most to resist. A collection pulls objects into a constellation of meaning larger than any one of its component parts. An estate sale does the opposite: it breaks the constellation apart and scatters pieces hither and yon. The assumption, of course, is that this is simply the life cycle of art in a market economy, that this violent dismemberment and dispersal will lead to another incarnation, and that art, like life, goes on. The great collections could always insist on their own immortality. Sloane’s sale to the British Museum, like the other big sales that followed, made “preservation” a prerequisite. But these were the exceptions not the rule. Sotheby’s job was to see to it that works of art collected over a lifetime were divided into lots best calculated to bring the highest return. Thus, no matter how lofty its pretensions, the estate sale was always a somewhat sad affair. What had began as a body of objects brought into alignment and animated by the force of a single personality ends up being cannibalized by market forces seemingly beyond anyone’s control.
The title page of Sotheby’s catalogue speaks to these complexities: it is at once a description a unique collection of art, a tribute to a recently deceased member of the London art world, and an effusive advertisement for an upcoming commercial event. That Monday afternoon in June Sotheby had every reason to be concerned about how “Valuable” the collection would turn out to be. He had no reason, however, to distract himself with the questions that commentators, critics, and historians have been asking of Rowlandson since the early 1780s. How “Distinguished” was the “Distinguished Artist,” in fact? Is “Artist” even the right word? Should we, to be fair, use instead “illustrator,” “satirist,” or “draughtsman”? In 1828, after a career of more than fifty years, Thomas Rowlandson could indeed be considered “Distinguished,” and not just by an auction house puffing for profit. He was indisputably popular. But what sort of artist was he? Obviously, not a painter. In 1828, John Constable and J. W. M. Turner were well on their way to changing English art forever; John Martin was pushing hard against the boundaries of the sublime; and Benjamin Haydon had committed himself to ruin in the pursuit of history. Rowlandson was not of their ilk. He had taken his classes at the Royal Academy, attended lectures by its new President, Joshua Reynolds, and had even received a silver medal in academy competition. He had considered staying with oils, painting portraits, and elbowing his way into a kind of prominence in the London art world. Instead, he preferred watercolors and the least complicated of prints, the etching. With this preference he committed himself not just to a medium but to a way of seeing the world. He committed himself to the sketch.[viii] Technically, of course, the sketch is a preliminary drawing, a first step, something tentative, incomplete, unfinished, always already inferior to a later, final product. But the sketch is also the original, the place of truth and authenticity from which all else derives. The spare lines and hasty figures have their own kind of aesthetic power, not that which derives from accretion, from endless polish or refinement, but instead that of immediacy, the rhetorical magic of less-as-more that takes the viewer back to the moment of creation in all its social and historical specificity. The aesthetics of oil could not be more different. Oil painting–of all kinds–aspires to the monumental. Even layered on stretched canvas, it evokes fresco and statuary and the permanence of stone. Portraits memorialize; history paintings commemorate; landscapes capture a nature that, even at its most protean, embodies the eternal. In such a world, Rowlandson’s preference for watercolor drawing, for comic satire, for political caricature, would hardly make him a “Distinguished Artist.” Nor would it spark an aesthetic argument about immediacy and monument or the power of the sketch. It would signal instead, unequivocally, an admission of commercial intent. It would, through the hierarchy of medium, confess to a desire for profit and popularity. It would, as boldly and as unapologetically as the comedies for which he is famous, confirm a willingness to give up the power and prestige associated with the “original” and instead to flood the market with cheap paper reproductions. If there was power in the monument, in the memorial, in the commemoration, there was also power in the prolific, the inexpensive, and the ubiquitous. But that power, the power of the popular, was secondhand at best. It brought with it immediate qualification. Yes, Rowlandson was agreed to be one of England’s finest draughtsman, but he was also one of its most unrepentant practitioners of commercial art.