Born in July 1756, in a narrow alley of old London, he grew up amidst the people. As a young man he saw Paris, Germany, and the Low Countries. He went regularly to all clubs where there was high play. As man, painter, and draughtsman alike, he stood in the midst of life. Street scenes in Paris and London engage his pencil, especially scenes from Vauxhall Gardens, the meeting-place of fashionable London, and there is often a touch of Menzel in the palpitating life of these pictures--in these lords and ladies, fops and ballad-singers, who pass through the grounds of the gardens in a billowy stream. His illustrations include everything: soldiers, navvies, life at home and in the tavern, in town and in village, on the stage and behind the scenes, at masquerades and in Parliament. When he died at seventy, on 22nd April 1827, the obituaries were able to say of him with truth that he had drawn all England in the years between 1774 and 1809. And all these leaves torn from the life of sailors and peasants, these fairs and markets, beggars, huntsmen, smiths, artizans, and day labourers, were not caricatures, but sketches keenly observed and sharply executed from life. His countrymen have at times a magnificent Michelangelesque stir of life which almost suggests Millet. He was fond of staying at fashionable watering-places, and came back with charming scenes from high life. But his peculiar field of observation was the poor quarter of London. Here are the artizans, the living machines. Endurance, persistence, and resignation may be read in their long, dismal, angular faces. Here are the women of the people, wasted and hectic. Their eyes are set deep in their sockets, their noses sharp and their skin blotched with red spots. They have suffered much and had many children; they have a sodden, depressed, stoically callous appearance; they have borne much, and can bear still more. And then the devastations of gin! that long train of wretched women who of an evening prostitute themselves in the Strand to pay for their lodging! those terrible streets of London, where pallid children beg, and tattered spectres, either sullen or drunken, rove from public-house to public-house, with torn linen and rags hanging about them in shreds! The cry of misery rising from the pavement of great cities was first heard by Rowlandson, and the pages on which he drew the poor of London are a living dance of death of the most ghastly veracity.