Thomas Rowlandson, "Beagles" Early 19th C. Country People & Dogs. Rockefeller Provenance

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Originally the property of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., this watercolor scene, depicting a group of ordinary, early 19th-century English … Read more Originally the property of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., this watercolor scene, depicting a group of ordinary, early 19th-century English folk and their dogs resting in the shade, passed to her son David Rockefeller, an American economist and investment banker who served as chairman and chief executive of Chase Manhattan Corporation.
The label “Kykuit Distribution,” on the verso, refers to the Rockefeller 40-room estate in Sleepy Hollow, New York. The date May 1963, coincides with that month’s scandalous wedding at Kykuit of David’s brother Nelson, later Vice President of the United States, to his second wife Happy. Oh, if the walls this piece hung on could talk.
The Georgian era artist Thomas Rowlandson exhibited a keen gift for political and social satire. And being born in an age of excess offered him an abundance of worthy subjects to skewer, like Napoleon Bonaparte, politician William Pitt the Younger, and the notorious gambler and beauty, the Duchess of Devonshire.
Rowlandson showed real flare early on, routinely sketching humorous takedowns of his teachers and classmates in the margins of his school books before age 10. As an adult, he indulged in some of the peccadillos of his subjects. He was known to produce scandalously explicit erotica for the enjoyment of his anonymous but privileged clientele.
Further, when an aunt left him £7,000, a fortune equivalent to £750,000 today, Rolandson gambled sums as if he were a Rockefeller. He was observed holding forth for 36 hours at a time at the gaming table. See less