Thomas Rowlandson

In an elegant interior filled with art, 11 rather inelegant-looking men have gathered around a fireplace for after-dinner drinks. The refined setting and the figures in conversation identify the party as cognoscenti, or connoisseurs. In the late 1700s, when English caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson made this drawing, such people and their pretensions were easy fodder for satirists, who regularly poked fun at them in prints, drawings, and paintings, sometimes referencing the boozy nature of their gatherings.

Thomas Rowlandson’s satirical pictures and prints poked fun at every aspect of English society. Here he gently ridicules the 18th-century Grand Tour and the culture of refinement it fostered among the wealthy and privileged. These gentlemen Cognoscenti (Italian for connoisseurs) meet to share knowledge and compare collections of art and antiquities, such as the two busts displayed on ledges on the left wall. However, the distorted faces of these statues and the sleepy demeanor of the men suggest that their intellectual interests may be more social performance than genuine scholarly pursuit-that they only claim to have a higher appreciation for Italy’s history and artifacts. Such elite circles soon widened and diversified as travel became affordable for the middle classes in the 19th century.

Rowlandson portrayed the follies and pretensions at all levels of English society. A Meeting of the Cognoscenti spoofs the men who met to discuss Italian art after their return from the Grand Tour of Europe. Within a large, Georgian-period interior, Rowlandson created a series of parallels between the men and the objects placed about the room. The primly positioned high-back chairs along the wall mimic their body language, while the marble busts atop brackets seem to sneer facetiously at the group.