The Reviewers' Cave

John Hamilton Mortimer

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Mortimer's dynamic early pen-work is used here to develop a frontispiece for Lloyd Evans's "The Powers of the Pen: A Poem" (1768), a verse satire aimed at literary critics. The artist also etched the related print, and mined Alexander Pope’s "Dunciad" and "Rape of the Lock" for suitable imagery, with the rocky setting suggested by the latter's "Cave of Spleen." The drawing consists of two sections, with judges seated at right, one in the front row resembling Samuel Johnson, whose pomposity Evans lampoons. As workers bring in bushel baskets of books to be reviewed, a corpulent figure on a dais presides over an assemblage that includes a braying donkey. Above, Dullness lolls on clouds near flayed faces, or masks, hung from cords. At left, Mortimer sketched ideas for the main design. His rare working drawing engages with a distinct British type of visual satire that combines allegory, caricature and visual-verbal punning, a mode that Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray would take up in the 1780s.

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