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The Happy Family or The Married Man pencil, pen and ink, fragmentary watermark, Strasborg Lily 93/4 x 12 in. (24.7 x 30.5 cm.) PROVENANCE with Ferrers, Piccadilly Arcade, London. The Wauchope Family. Sir David Ross, K.B.E.(+); Christie's, London, 4 March 1975, lot 66. with Spink-Leger, London. ENGRAVED T. Rowlandson, 1786 as 'The Married Man'. LITERATURE Dr. John Hayes, Rowlandson, His Watercolours and Drawings, 1972, no. 56, p. 120, illustrated. J. Steel (ed.), Mr Rowlandson's England, London, 1985, p. 33, illustrated. EXHIBITION London, Leger Galleries, 8 December 1975-16 January 1976, no. 1. NOTES In this scene of domestic concord, the embrace of father and child echoes that of the mythical figures in the painting behind them. There is an air of serenity unusual for Rowlandson and, as John Hayes ( loc. cit. ) writes, the artist 'has kept his penwork to the minimum and allowed the colour, pale but sympathetic to the mood of the subject-matter, to sing out in broad, clean washes.' The painting was engraved by Rowlandson in 1786 as 'The Married Man' and accompanied by a pair of lilting couplets: 'When Hymen joins the Lover and the Fair Love spreads his guardian pinions o'er the pair; The smiles of Sweet Contentment cheer his dome, And all the Pleasures make his house their Home.' The engraving probably relates to a coloured plate book of the 'Poems of Peter Pindar' that Rowlandson was working on at this time and which was published in quarto between 1786 and 1792 by G. Kearsley. Peter Pindar was the comic pseudonym of John Walcot (1738-1819), a satirist with a farcical sense of humour who was also intimately bound up with the world of art. His first major work was Lyric Odes to the Royal Academicians which includes some fine art criticism. The couplets above may well be by Walcot, evoking happiness which is tinged with satire to accompany Rowlandson's depiction of harmony which surely itself has a hint of caricature.