Vauxhall Gardens by Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827).
Thomas Rowlandson / Adam Cuerden
28 June 1785
- Classification
- Painting
- Museum
- Wikimedia Commons
- Credit line
- This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID ppmsca.05671. This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still…
- Rights
- Public domain, as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
About this work
In the supper-box on the left we see, reading left to right, James Boswell, Mrs Thrale (who appears twice), Dr. Johnson, and Oliver Goldsmith.
The ‘macaroni’ Captain Edward Topham (scandalmonger to The World) is quizzing Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and her sister Lady Duncannon (Sheridan’s Lady Bessborough), watched by a naval figure with an eye patch and a wooden leg (not included in the Mellon version), always called Admiral Paisley, but Paisley did not lose his leg and eye until 1st June 1794, so it cannot be him. To the left of him, a young girl (a young boy in the Mellon version) holding the hand of a man who could be the comic actor, William Parsons, or Rowlandson’s friend Jack Bannister.
Peering at the two ladies from behind a tree is a figure traditionally, though improbably, identified as Sir Henry Bate-Dudley, the ‘Fighting Parson’, editor of the Morning Herald; he is more likely to be Thomas Tyers (son of Jonathan Tyers the great entrepreneur and proprietor of Vauxhall Gardens from 1729 until 1767) who stands next to the Scotsman James Perry, editor of the London Gazette. The couple on their right could well be the artist himself and his current girlfriend. and…
