Dropsy Courting Consumption

Thomas Rowlandson

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Rowlandson here contrasts fatness and thinness to weave a broad social parody. Two courting couples, embodying four extremes of age and body type, demonstrate the maxim that opposites attract. In the foreground a short obese man has fallen to his knees to declare his devotion to a tall, ematicated woman. The title hints that the two also suffer from opposing ailments, since consumption (tuberculosis) is a wasting disease and dropsy (edema) causes swelling. In the garden behind, the equation is reversed, with an elderly thin man in an old-fashioned suit escorting a plump young girl. The foreground mausoleum, with its heavy rotunda surrounded by slender columns, contributes to the visual game. Finally, a distant statue of Hercules on a pedestal represents the classical ideal that all those present spectacularly fail to attain.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art