The Pursuits of Pleasure Thomas Rowlandson's satirical view of Georgian society

By ROBERT HUGHES

"He has covered with his never-flagging pencil enough of charta pura ((white paper)) to placard the whole walls of China, and etched as much copper as would sheathe the British Navy." So ran one obituary for Thomas Rowlandson when he died in 1827 at the age of 70. It was not far off. This recorder of the life of Georgian and Regency England left a prodigious number of watercolors, drawings and prints behind him -- perhaps 10,000, though nobody has ever counted them up -- and there is no catalogue raisonne of his work.

The idea of a "complete" Rowlandson retrospective is therefore unthinkable. But the Frick Collection in New York City last week mounted a more modest exhibit: some 80 drawings and watercolors, curated by art historian John Hayes, that will be seen through April 8 and in Pittsburgh and Baltimore later this year. The show samples without fatigue the best of Rowlandson's work and includes several of his real masterpieces, notably Vauxhall Gardens, 1784, that charivari of Georgian London in pursuit of pleasure: fops, soldiers, beggars, rowdies, beauties, literary celebrities, the high and the low jostling and quizzing one another, each fresh, distinct and full of life.

William Hogarth invented the panorama of social class as a subject in English painting. Rowlandson, who was eight when Hogarth died, continued the tradition, with an equal gusto but greater humor. The dark side of Hogarth, his capacity for moral rage, is largely missing in Rowlandson, and his interest in art theory is entirely absent. The biggest difference of all was that Rowlandson had none of Hogarth's ambition for major categories of art, not just history painting, but oil painting itself. He was perfectly content with pen and watercolor. But his mastery of them was complete, and it shows everywhere: in the supple energy of his line, in the feathery offhand signs for foliage and clouds, in the unerring grasp of tone that enabled him to particularize those dense, rowdy friezes of people so coherently against the pale buildings and landscapes.

Rowlandson's energy is infectious. It fairly seethes in images like A Gaming Table at Devonshire House, 1791, where two of the wild aristocratic beauties of the day -- Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and her sister Lady Bessborough -- preside like maenads over the eddy of faces, dicing table and money, and a lecherous buck offers a woman a purse which, none too subtly, is shaped like a pair of testicles.

One thinks of Rowlandson as purely English, because of his devotion to the English scene and his delight in guying the manners and affectations of the French. But he was unusually well traveled. In a day when tourism was an arduous and expensive business, confined mainly to the rich, he made several visits to France (in the 1780s), toured Holland and Germany, and seems to have been to Rome and Florence. His final trip to Paris was in 1814, when he went to see the enormous collection of paintings and sculptures that Napoleon had brought back as war plunder for the Louvre. What he saw comes out in his work, in an unpretentious and conversational way, in the poses of figures quoted from all manner of old masters and antique statuary. It even pervades the many pornographic drawings he did to stimulate the jaded appetites of the Prince Regent, which are not included at the Frick.

But beyond this, Rowlandson absorbed -- and anglicized -- a general style: he was a rococo artist, though this is partly hidden by his love of satire (never a rococo trait). He constructed his designs from whiplash lines and curvilinear rhythms. He was devoted to Rubens, preserving on a tiny scale the rush and tumble and fullness (if not the grand muscular articulation) of that master's paintings. British critic Sacheverell Sitwell was right to compare Rowlandson's sketch of guests floundering, bare-bottomed and head over heels, down the staircase at a "crush" at Somerset House to Rubens' Last Judgment in Munich.

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, gross and mangy, peering with lust and censure at the beautiful juicy young, who mainly ignore them. This, he keeps saying, is what you will come to. He is saying it to the viewer, of course, but most insistently to himself.