Thomas Rowlandson, A Sportsman with his Family Instructing Woodmen to Chop up a Felled Tree, c. 1816, pen and brush and vermilion and gray inks with watercolor over graphite on beige wove paper. The Clark, gift of the Manton Art Foundation in memory of Sir Edwin and Lady Manton, 2007.20.39

The Manton gift that established British art as a major component of the Clark collection is known for its landscape focus, but it also contains significant figural works. Among these are seventeen of Thomas Rowlandson’s celebrated scenes of everyday drama, which often abound in humorous characters and gentle satire. The Clark’s collection of British art likewise includes academic figure studies, a compositional study for a scene from Shakespeare, and strong examples of mezzotint portraiture, a tonal method of making printed likenesses that reached its technical zenith (as well as its height of fashionability) in Britain in the late eighteenth century.