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The City


Loan Contractors, Thomas Rowlandson, c.1794-1801, Watercolour


London's 'Square Mile' is the area traditionally associated with finance. In satire this association is transformed into the depiction of the place where Mammon, or fortune and material possessions, is worshipped.

The city's residents and workers are depicted as extremes of fat and thin, which in turn represent greed and miserliness. The gluttonous Alderman and the skinny stock-jobber (stock broker) inhabit the Back of England and vie with each other for profit.


Stock Jobbers, Thomas Rowlandson, c.1802, Pen with vermillion and watercolour    Another slice of plumb pudding for Councellor Wollop, I. Sledge, 1774, Mezzotint    A Pillar of the Exchange, Richard Dighton, c.1815, Pencil and watercolour

In the main watercolour by Thomas Rowlandson, William Pitt the Younger describes a loan to a group of financiers. Rowlandson is satirising Pitt's policy of the 'Sinking Fund', to rescue the national debt after the war with France.

 

 

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