Six Stages of Marring a Face

Thomas Rowlandson

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A man's head and shoulders are repeated here six times, suffering progressive injuries during a boxing match. At upper right the subject is handsome, muscular and unscathed, but ends up bleeding and unconscious at lower left. Rowlandson's dedication in the lower margin connects the image to Douglas Hamilton, 8th Duke of Hamilton, a Scottish peer who inherited his title as a teenager. An extended European educational tour of Europe did little to suppress an impulsive nature and, soon after returning to England, the twenty-one year old duke married against his mother's wishes–the union was marred by multiple infidelities and ended in divorce. Andrew Steptoe notes that the duke was considered "one of the handsomest men of his day...[but] gradually gave way to dissipation. He was fond of boxing and low company." Rowlandson's image uses boxing metaphorically to suggest the duke's cumulative self-imposed difficulties. Sadly, seven years after this print was published, he died at age forty-three.

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