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While caricatures of social groups such as this were a staple part of Rowlandson's oeuvre, he was also an extremely accomplished portraitist, a facet of his work that is underrated today. A Sporting Cove is one of Rowlandson's intermittent forays into portraiture, although whether the subject is an actual sitter, an individual caricature, or merely an imagi nary "type" is debatable. Although this particular "cove" sports a fashionable top hat and coat, his face is battered and distorted into a vision of ugliness, the hat is worn at a disreputable angle, and a shifty leer plays upon his lips. Clearly, Rowlandson invites the viewer to see him as an aged and disreputable dandy of the sort that populate his other drawings, such as The Gaming Table of 1801 (fig. 5). Here the cove's physical ugliness is equated to moral degeneracy, a judgment that was commonplace in an age that paid serious regard to physiognomy, the "science" that taught how to determine a person's character from facial features alone. In the early 1790s, Rowlandson had copied some of the expressive heads published by the French court portraitist Joseph Ducreux (1735-1802), who visited London in 1791. Ducreux was a committed physiognomist and heavily influenced by the ideas of Johann Caspar Lavater, the author of the period's most important publication on physiognomy: Physiognomische Fragmente of 1775-78, which was available in English from 1789 as Essays on Physiognomy in an edition that boasted 800 engraved illustrations. Lavater hoped to persuade his readers that physiognomy was a serious branch of natural philosophy and to provide them with a surefire means of judging a person's character. Influenced by these ideas, Rowlandson worked on his own publications of physiognomy and comparative anatomy towards the end of his life. That Rowlandson gave credence to such pseudoscience is one of the less comic aspects of his art, and this study of an ageing cove can be related to these interests. However, his handling of watercolor in this work is extremely high-spirited. When blended with the wiry pen line, the apparently carefree application of pink tints to the face creates the convincing impression of a craggy visage. The cove's hat and coat are both given solidity by using nothing more than two separate shades of gray. Whatever Rowlandson's judgments about the cove's inner life might have been, he has portrayed his outer features with the minimum of means necessary to create a portrait of extraordinary vitality.

Matthew Hargraves

Hargraves, Matthew, and Scott Wilcox. Great British Watercolors: from the Paul Mellon collection. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2007, p. 67, no. 28