Dinners Drest in the Neatest Manner

Thomas Rowlandson

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Rowlandson addresses the dilemma faced by all who dine out–the mystery of what takes place behind a closed kitchen door. The title restates the hollow promise made to patrons of an inn, whose kitchen we see in operation. Instead of clean food neatly prepared, a grotesque one-eyed cook rolls out a meat pie while bedewing the dish with rheum dripping from his nose and mouth, the stream stimulated by snuff held in a small round box. The slovenly standards of the kitchen extend to a maid with an exposed breast who reaches for a dish and fails to notice rats escaping from it. While Rowlandson trained at the Royal Academy and could produce sophisticated Rococo compositions, he was also a master of ribaldry. Most of his prints in this vein were issued by Thomas Tegg, a London print publisher, who sold the present example for a shilling.

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