Pygmalion's "Wanton Kind of Chace": Hogarth, Rowlandson and the "Line of Beauty"

Pygmalion's "Wanton Kind of Chace": Hogarth, Rowlandson and the "Line of Beauty" ADAM KOMISARUK T'his is an essay about a dirty picture, made around 1800 by a leading practitioner ofthat art, Thomas Rowlandson. In recent years, although major social histories of pornography have emerged,1 this artist's voluminous oeuvre has attracted little systematic analysis. His erotic works remain in disparate collections with no catalogue raisonné.2 Thirty years have elapsed since Ronald Paulson's "new interpretation" of Rowlandson;3 theory, especially feminism, has been virtually silent on the subject. An atmosphere of either sheepish evasion or smirking insinuation can attend the occasional critic who takes Rowlandson seriously. While I will not pretend to redress this situation at a stroke, I would like to delineate, by way of a single work, some aspects of Rowlandson's aesthetic as they relate to the conception of the erotic self. The picture (fig. 1) is variously titled "Pygmalion and Galatea", "The Modem Pygmalion" or simply "The Ancients." Pygmalion, his sculpting tools fallen by his side, reclines naked on a cloth-draped couch. He stares adoringly at the newly animated Galatea, who clambers up to mount him sexually. She grasps his right hand with her right while steadying his penis with her left. The assignation takes place in what appears to be a classical rotunda. Nude and seminude females in antique attire stare down at the lovers from the gallery. The pedestal of the enormous dolphin-handled um to the right depicts the rape of the Sabine 369 370 / KOMISARUK Figure 1. Thomas Rowlandson, Pygmalion and Galatea (c. 1800?). Etching and Watercolor. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Pygmalion's "Wanton Kind of Chace" / 371 women; the erection sported by the Roman male literally parallels Pygmalion's. The bodies of Pygmalion and Galatea, both individually and jointly, form an S-shaped curve that dominates many of Rowlandson's satirical illustrations. The Exhibition Stare-Case, for example, depicts a mishap at Sir William Chambers' Somerset House, a Royal-Academy venue with a serpentining, notoriously steep stairwell. In The Life Class, the female model's S-shaped pose emphasizes her serene insouciance toward the illproportioned oglers.4 In what may be his most important observation about Rowlandson, Paulson traces this motive to William Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty, Written with a View of Fixing the Fluctuating Ideas of Taste5 — a 1753 essay that distills as the fundamental principle of art the S-shaped curve, the line of variety, or as Hogarth dubs it the "Line of Beauty" (fig. 2).6 The Analysis includes two large fold-out prints, one of a statuary yard and the other of a courtly dance; each principal scene is framed by smaller numbered figures which Hogarth uses as examples in his text. Thus the muscled human thigh is beautiful but the tubular wooden leg is not; the sinuous pose of the Antinous is beautiful but that of the stiffbacked fop is not; the gentle dancers are beautiful, but not the Henry VIII who stares down at them from the wall, with his knees locked and hands on hips; and the twisted cornucopia is beautiful but becomes less so as it approaches the simple cone. The beauty of every one of these forms is in proportion to how much or how little it employs the serpentine line. Despite an absoluteness in "fix[ing] the fluctuating ideas of taste" that might make the young Edmund Burke grin, the Analysis has as its fundamental theme the encounter with flux and difference. I would like to explore how Hogarth's valorization of "variety" destabilizes the aesthetic object and, in tum, the perceiving subject in ways for which psychoanalysis provides a vocabulary. Moreover, although Hogarth seems at first to welcome such a destabilization, his confrontation with female sexuality leads him to desire not difference but homogeneity. The line of beauty measures both the artist's solicitude to trammel sexual difference and the futility of such an effort. I will argue that Rowlandson the satirist is fundamentally more honest about the self-defeating quality of the line of beauty than Hogarth.7 Bradford Mudge—an able critic of Rowlandson and reconstractor of the...