This gripping story of one of the great graphic satirists and watercolour artists of the British School is based upon a mass of new research. Rowlandson kept no diary, wrote few letters, and occurs only infrequently in the memoirs of others. Source material is not abundant. But in more than a decade's research, using church and official records, newspaper reports, contemporary accounts, sales catalogues and consideration of his pictures, the authors shed new light on Rowlandson's family background, his education and art training in London and Paris, his personal and professional associations, his travels in Britain and abroad, and the work itself. Fully illustrated, this major contribution to scholarship will appeal to the general reader and specialist alike and is destined to become the standard work on this benchmark British artist.