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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.