In the room, where of old the eccentrics met
When mortals were Brilliants, and fond of a whet,
And Hecate environ’d all London in jet.

Where Adolphus, and Sherri’, and famed

Charley Fox,

With a hundred good Whigs led by Alderman Cox,
Put their names in the books, and their cash in the box;

Where perpetual Whittle, facetiously grand,

On the president's throneeach night took his stand,
With his three-curly wig, and his hammer in hand:

Then Brownly, with eloquence florid and clear,
Pour'd a torrent of metaphor into the ear,

With well-rounded periods, and satire severe.

Here too Peter Finnerty, Erin's own child,

Impetuous, frolicsome, witty and wild.

With many a tale has our reason beguiled:

Then wit was triumphant, and night after night
Was the morn usher’d in with a flood of delight.

Bernard Blackmantle (pseudonym for Charles Molloy Westmacott), The English Spy, 1825, vol. 1, p. 353)

The Brilliants (later known as The Eccentrics) was a Whig club first established in the late eighteenth century at the Swan, in Chandos Street, Covent Garden, and later at the Sutherland Arms in St Martin’s Lane. According to Charles Molloy Westmacott (c.1788-1868), author, journalist and editor of The Age (the leading Sunday newspaper in the early 19th century) its members were connected with the press and theatre. We know some of the regular attendees - Richard Brinsley Sheridan (‘Sherri’), Charles James Fox, the historian and barrister John Adolphus and the Irishman Peter Finnerty - put down in verse by Molloy (see poem overleaf), and which pairs with Rowlandson’s caricature. The members met late after the theatres closed and continued into the early hours of the morning, wit and drinking the order of the day. The Club rules stated:

1st That each member shall fill a half-pint bumper

to the first toast.

2nd That after twenty-four bumper toasts are gone

round every member may fill as he pleases.

3rd That any member refusing to camply with the above regulations to be fined, compelled to swallow a bumper of salt and water.

In the engraving Rowlandson made with the renowned printmaker Rudolph Ackermann that follows this watercolour closely, the rules are written to the left of the fireplace. There is a later variant of the drawing dated to c.1801 in the Art Gallery of South Australia, but the differences denote it was not the basis for the engraving. Editions of the print are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, and the British Museum, London.

Seated at the far left appears the president of the verse ‘Whittle’, stout in a light brown-buff coat, his glass raised high and a gavel poised to call attention. It is clear the night has long descended into drunkenness and disorder. The man standing at the centre of the table appears to have either taken exception or attempts his own toast; about the table, those not completely inebriated the smile and cheer. To the sides intrigue also unfolds; from the figure lying on the floor, a bowl of water seemingly being poured over him while another face lurks in the shadow of the curtain behind; above the screen by the mantlepiece a man peers over, his hand on a hat, while to the right two servers enter, one with a steaming serving bowl, the other mid-opening a bottle, soon to be added to the pile of bottles amassed in front of him.

The compositional arrangement, presenting a crowd of figures on a singular long axis was a defining feature of Rowlandson’s work. The eye is led across the table by a series of measured intervals, each member given a distinct attitude that the others do not repeat. Rowlandson was much the inheritor of the tradition established by William Hogarth (1697-1764), whose narrative and moralising works of contemporary society established the genre. It has been suggested that Rowlandson was indeed looking to Hogarth’s A Midnight Modern Conversation (1733), which depicts a group of men gathered around a table in different stages of drunkenness, and with similar devices including the toppled chair, the prostrate member and empty bottles. Rowlandson lightens Hogarth’s moral censure into something closer to amused fellow-feeling; they are less condemned and more observed, perhaps because Rowlandson may have been a member of The Brilliants or a guest attendee.

The Brilliants belongs among the half-dozen designs by which Rowlandson’s social satire of the late 1790s is now most widely known. Following its original print run, it was reissued in coloured impressions across the first three decades of the nineteenth century, and the present watercolour is the working point from which that long after-life began.