Tegg's Caricatures No 53 : College Pranks, or Crabbed Fellows Taught to Caper on the Slack Rope.

Method Etching with original hand colouring
Artist Thomas Rowlandson
Published Thos. Tegg No. 111 Cheapside [28 January 1811]
Dimensions Sheet 256 x 350 mm
Notes Two elderly fat academics fall over a rope held by two groups of undergraduates in an aisle of a Gothic church. A young woman is pulling the rope with the group on the right. Two students brandish whips, one is firinga water squirt and another lets of a squib. On the floor is a stone or brass with a mitre and crosier inscribed 'Here Lies the Body of Bishop Blear eyes'.

With the text 'Price One Shilling Coloured' and publication line absent.

Thomas Rowlandson (1756 - 1827) was an English watercolourist and caricaturist. Born in London, the son of a weaver, Rowlandson studied at the Soho Academy from 1765. On leaving school in 1772, he became a student at the Royal Academy and made the first of many trips to Paris where he may have studied under Jean-Baptiste Pigalle. In 1775 he exhibited the drawing Dalilah Payeth Sampson a Visit while in Prison at Gaza at the Royal Academy and two years later received a silver medal for a bas-relief figure. As a printmaker Rowlandson was largely employed by the art publisher Rudolph Ackermann, who in 1809, issued in his Poetical Magazine The Schoolmaster's Tour, a series of plates with illustrative verses by Dr. William Combe. Proving popular, the plates were engraved again in 1812 by Rowlandson himself, and issued under the title The Tour of Dr Syntax in Search of the Picturesque. By 1813 the series had attained a fifth edition, and was followed in 1820 by Dr Syntax in Search of Consolation, Third Tour of Dr Syntax in Search of a Wife in 1821 and also in the same year by The history of Johnny Quae Genus, the little foundling of the late Doctor Syntax. Rowlandson also illustrated work by Smollett, Goldsmith and Sterne, and for The Spirit of the Public Journals (1825), The English Spy (1825), and The Humorist (1831).

BM Satires 11781

Condition: Trimmed within the platemark top and sides. Repaired corner upper right, not affecting the image.
Framing mounted
Price £450.00
Stock ID 36301

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