Word: rowlandson
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...Economist points out that "on the death of George IV in 1830 The Times declared in an editorial that: 'There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures.' Cartoonists such as Gilfray, Rowlandson and Cruickshank attacked the monarch in a manner which would look savage even today.' This intense criticism and lack of respect for the monarchy did not produce a serious, widespread consideration to sack it. Edward VIII's abdication crisis in 1936 might have provided some civil liberties rationale for abolition, but it did not. It was clear that the monarchy practiced discrimination in dismissing members...
...British Civil Servant husband for an Indian nawab. Mukherjee blatantly refers to The Great game of Kipling's Kim. Hannah's cosmic relationship with history seems suspiciously similar to Saleem's--the narrator of Midnight's Children-- linkage to Indian history. Mukherjee evens claims The Captivity Narrative of Mary Rowlandson as an ancestor to Hannah's tryst with the natives. It works, then, when Mukherjee suggests that Nathanial Hawthorne was influenced by Hannah's tale in his writing of The Scarlet Letter. Nothing seems lifted or cheap. Indeed, Mukherjee pays homage tastefully and respectfully. The interplay of literary history works...
Despite its seeming modesty of size and intention, Rowlandson's work found echoes in Europe. Particularly so in the efforts of Goya, who sometimes drew on English satirical prints as sources for his own graphic work. One can detect more than a few appropriations of Rowlandson in the Caprichos. And one of Goya's scariest images, They Preen Themselves -- one demon giving another a pedicure -- seems to come from Rowlandson's group of a woman cutting an officer's toenail in The French Barracks, 1786, though how Goya actually got to see this particular Rowlandson is a mystery...
Artists have favorite tropes, metaphors to which they resort semiconsciously over and over again. Rowlandson's chief one was the opposition between youth and age, freshness and decay, virility and impotence. He was not in any real sense a political artist -- unlike his colleague James Gillray. Beneath Rowlandson's comedy there was a clawing, nagging fear of falling apart. As well there should have been, the censorious might add: he was a rake, too fond of cards, women and the bottle for his own good. And his work is full of Dreadful Elders, gouty, poxed, many-chinned, snouted, toothless, cunning...
...Thomas Rowlandson's drawings and watercolors at the Frick Collection in New York City are friezes of dense and rowdy life in gaming room and salon...