Height: 237 millimetres

Width: 170 millimetres

(Description and comment from M.Dorothy George, 'Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the British Museum', VII, 1942) A set of twelve 'Drawings faithfully copied from Nature at Naples' by F. Rehberg, published by Fores in 1794, represents Lady Hamilton in her famous attitudes, wearing Greek draperies. These were burlesqued in 1807, the subject being altered from a slim young woman to a very fat elderly one; published by Humphrey as 'A New Edition Considerably enlarged, of Attitudes faithfully copied from Nature . . .', presumably the book advertised at Humphrey's sale in 1835 as 'Lady Hamilton's Attitudes' (B.M.L. 1753. b. 3,4). 'Studies of Academic Attitudes', with a nude reclining figure, is depicted in Gillray's 'Dido in Despair!' (1801), see vol. viii. Reproduced, Fuchs und Kind, 'Die Weiberherrschaft', 1913, i. 153.

Text from Ian Jenkins & Kim Sloan, 'Vases and Volcanoes' BM 1996 cat.192 This print is most likely the source of an unsubstantiated tradition that Emma Hart once modelled for the life class at the Royal Academy. The caricature has been dated to c.1800 because that was when the other caricatures appeared, but it is possible it was produced shortly after Emma's marriage to Sir William in London in September 1791. She spent much of the previous summer modelling for Romney and other artists (including Lawrence; see Oo,5.22), and she performed her 'attitudes' frequently in London and at various country seats. In Kauffman's painting of Emma as ‘The Comic Muse’, engraved by R. Morghen (1843,0513.1009), begun before the artist left Naples, she was shown pulling aside drapery to reveal herself holding a mask, as in 1981,u.258, although in Kauffman's painting she was fully clothed. Kauffman chose a sedate and respectable image of the Muse of mirth, but Rowlandson shows that he was aware of the other side of this muse's character as a bacchante, her figure echoed by the one embraced by a satyr in the background. Hamilton himself is obviously intended by the old thin man with his recognisable profile and glasses; he is shown as an elderly Pygmalion revealing his Galatea, with reminders of his collection in the busts on the floor and the vase into which the model dips her foot.