onts. His two years' residence in the midst of these
appetising surroundings must have been the happiest of Rowlandson's
career; the seeds sown amid these gayer scenes blossomed forth in later
years, and influenced the artist in gradually devoting his gifts from
the dull routine of portrait-painting to the indulgence of his fruitful
imagination."

Whether indeed all the influence which the critic here mentions was
entirely for good, is, I think myself, open to question. It is quite
possible that our artist acquired at this time the taste for gambling
which led him to the brink of ruin more than once in later life; and I
have suggested already that had he kept to painting he might have
achieved in that medium a fame far above even that which he now
possesses. For on his return to London he resumed his studies at the
Royal Academy Schools, and in 1775 exhibited at the Academy "Samson
visited by Delilah," which he followed up by the portraits on which he
was busy now in Wardour Street from 1778 to 1781. His work must have
shown considerable power to be hung beside the canvases of Reynolds,
Romney, and Hoppner; but at the later date of 1784 his exhibited
drawings--"Vauxhall Gardens," "The Serpentine," and "An Italian
Family"--show already a tendency to the lighter side of art, and between
the above date and 1787 the direction of his art has changed in favour
of caricature.

His imagination was as fertile as his pencil was facile. The market was
easy--Fores (for whom Gillray also worked), Ackermann,[13] and others
offering a ready sale for his satires; and, since we are treating of him
here as a caricaturist, it is at this point that we must take his work
in detail. The purely humorous prints commence as early as 1781 ("The
Village Doctor," published in June of that year by Humphrey), and are
followed up (November 27, same year and publisher) by "Charity Covereth
a Multitude of Sins," and that unpleasing subject (published by Fores,
1783) of "The Amputation"; but it is in his political cartoons of
1784--such as "Britannia roused, or the Coalition Monster
destroyed"--that we begin to recognise the distinctive touch of Thomas
Rowlandson. This vigorous print shows a half-draped female figure
catching Charles James Fox by the ankle and Lord North by the throat; in
this print he takes the same political attitude as his contemporary
Gillray, whom he resembles, though far less virulently, in his
anti-French prints, while he shows