Box Lobby Loungers,

1785

The British caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson achieved a popular success with his prints and drawings that satirized English high society. In Box-Lobby Loungers, bourgeois and aristocratic audiences intermingle in the lobby of Covent Garden. In 1785, contemporary viewers would have easily identified the principal figure of the tall gentleman near the center of the crowded theater lobby as Colonel George Hanger, a notorious womanizer of the time, and a favorite companion of the Prince of Wales, later George IV. The artist added a playbill to the wall that advertised: "The Way of the World", today recognized as one of the best of the Restoration comedies which often contrasted a courtly rakish bon vivant such as Colonel Hanger with a dull-witted bourgeois man of business. The play poked fun at social mores of the time, comparing old fashioned marriages to modern marital relations and their financial arrangements.