Four drawings, each depicting a different character with their face in the form of a heart: a man drinking; a man with a pipe; a violinist; and an elegant lady.
Eleven drawings, each depicting a different character with their face in the form of a heart: a man playing a flute; a dour-looking cleryman; a coachman; a vendor wearing a turban; a man in a tricorne hat; an obese man in an armchair with medicine on a side table; a man smoking a pipe. Also two cards wtih older woman clutching a blanket around her shoulders; a pretty young women with a highly decorated hat with feathers and her hands in a muff; and, a female ballad sheet vendor.
- Artist: Dubuisson, Elizabeth, artist.
- Title: [Designs for transformation playing cards] [art original].
- Production: [England], [approximately 1830]
Drawings D821 no. 1
Acquired December 2022
Unsigned; attributed to Rowlandson.
Four sketches depicting scenes from accounts published in periodicals of the early 1820s, including The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction, volume I, 1822-23. The drawing ‘Janvier About to Kill the Indian Who had Relieved His Hunger’ illustrates the tale of Charles Janvier, which was was first published in John Long’s Voyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreter and Trader, 1791. The Mirror published an abridged version in November 1822. Janvier and two other servants had been sent by their master, Mr. Fulton, to catch supplies of meat and fish. Saved from hunger by a passing native Canadian who gives them food, Janvier kills and eats the stranger, a fate he later inflicts on one of his fellow servants. Volume I of The Mirror also recounts the story of the ‘Rescue of the Emperor Basilius Maredo’, the final sketch in this volume. The Emperor, snagged by a stag whilst hunting, is saved by the sword of a servant who is subsequently sentenced to death for drawing his sword in the presence of the Emperor. The tale of the first sketch, ‘Sultan Mahamoud punishing a Ravisher’, is told in Knapp and Baldwin’s Newgate Calendar, 1824. The final sketch, ‘A Miser Distracted’, appears to be a depiction of Aesop’s fable ‘The Miser and his Gold’, in which a miser concentrates all his wealth into one lump of gold which he buries before it is stolen from him.