Ackermann's Repository of Arts

London: Rudolph Ackermann, 1799. First Edition. Scroll housed in wood cylindrical box, with paper pastedown on sides. Custom clamshell box, quarter morocco, cloth elsewhere. Very Good/Custom Box: Fine. Thomas Rowlandson. The rarest of novelties -- a miniature caricature panorama that depicts a wide sweep of English Georgian society and culture, in all its exuberance, and created by the inimitable Thomas Rowlandson, no less! No institutional copies listed on OCLC First Search! The hand-colored aquatint panorama is housed in a boxwood drum, with a small procession of Rowlandson's cartoonish men on the side walls providing a preview of the artwork contained (truncated) on the scroll housed within. One pulls the scroll out with a small wooden endpiece, and it goes on and on, for a length of over 195 cm. The strip, in fact, is only 3.5 cm wide, meaning all the figures within are tiny. With the drum itself also only 6 cm at its greatest height and 3.5 cm in diameter, this is the panorama equivalent of a miniature book. The modern custom clamshell box, a most attractive repository for the Repository, is lined with felt and with a well where the drum is meant to rest, measures 19 by 13 cm and is 5.5 cm thick. The scroll itself is made from five sheets jointed together, onto which are printed and hand-colored 22 different scenes, among them, an art auction, a Punch and Judy show, two men courting a pretty woman at a dance, music-makers, fencers, a soap box orator, a bustling marketplace, beggars and frolickers, and people of all walks of life on the go. Not all the scenes are entirely clear to us, or shall we say, are open to various interpretations. But there can be no doubt that Rowlandson sought to depict all kinds of people, high and low. The figures are also very recognizably from Rowlandson's cast of characters, with Syntax, or Syntax-like, figures very much in evidence, as an example. The drum shows some wear to its paper pastedown. The top piece of the scroll, which is screwed into the body of the drum, has a touch of looseness, with the threading of the screw being worn. The scroll does not unspool from the drum with the ease intended, and returned the unspooled scroll to the drum requires pushing combined with the turning of the top piece. The first scene when one pulls out the panorama is darkened and soiled, after which, the scroll is quite clean. On the back of the scroll, which is almost entirely blank, there is by the pull a small mounted label with the title and publisher name -- this is also soiled but nonetheless intact. The date of publication is printed on the outside of the drum, at the bottom of the pastedown on the side. The modern custom box is without issue. (Inventory #: 20084)