Mudge / Portraits and Satire in Rowlandson’s Connoisseurs 163 Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 55, no. 2 (2022) Pp. 163–89. GAZING GAMES: PORTRAITS AND SATIRE IN ROWLANDSON’S CONNOISSEURS Bradford K. Mudge is a Professor of English at the University of Colorado Denver. He would like to thank the Center for Humanities & the Arts, University of Colorado Boulder, and the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, for their support in the research and writing of this essay. © 2022 by the ASECS Bradford K. Mudge Among the better known of Thomas Rowlandson’s comic satires is Con- noisseurs (1799), a depiction of four leering art enthusiasts intent on a Venus and Cupid before them (Figure 1). 1 The four lean in eagerly, and even without Susanna and the Elders peering down from the back wall, the joke would be obvious: con- noisseurs are overgrown adolescents looking at naked women, connoisseurship itself just highbrow prurience. Rowlandson’s print is well known because it is a good example of a theme that runs throughout his work—the pleasure of look- ing—and because that theme was important to its historical moment: the period that saw the rise of public art exhibitions, the founding of the Royal Academy, and the advent of museum culture. 2 In other words, Connoisseurs connects across Rowlandson’s oeuvre from famous exhibition watercolors like Vauxhall Gardens (1784) to popular prints like Exhibition Stare Case (1811) and to obscene satires like Cunnyseurs (n.d.) or Pygmalion (n.d.), at the same time that it also connects to the different spaces of connoisseurship, from private gallery to public pleasure garden to Royal Academy exhibition to artists’ studio. 3 No less significant are its ties to William Hogarth and his well-known enmity for connoisseurs and their partisanship of all things European. So it is that this cheerful spoof has become a recognizable feature on the scholarly landscape and one whose simple, self-evident design has served a variety of purposes without requiring significant explication. It is somewhat surprising, therefore, that commentators have neglected to consider the possibility that Rowlandson included recognizable portraits of actual connois- seurs and not just comic types, especially given the obvious stylistic differences in