On the evening of Saturday 30 July 1791, George Colman the Younger’s new tragicomedy The Surrender of Calais received its first performance at the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket. By the season’s end it had run twenty-eight nights, the most popular work of the summer. Thomas Rowlandson’s drawing depicts the foyer during the interval of one of those nights: the candle-sconces burning in the high-ceilinged lobby, the playbill for the evening pasted to the wall at the right, the audience streaming out from the auditorium for the comforts of the bar and the press of company.

Colman’s play, based upon the siege of Calais of 1346–1347, took its subject from the tale of Jean le Bel in Vrayes Chroniques, in which six citizens of Calais offered themselves to King Edward III so that their fellow townspeople would be spared. Samuel Arnold supplied the score; John Bannister, Rowlandson’s friend and the leading comic actor at Drury Lane, played the comic Frenchman La Gloire; Robert Bensley took the title role of St Pierre. The piece was a hybrid of tragedy, comedy, opera and farce, traits reflected in the audience Rowlandson presents us: women in plumed headdresses, ogling men, dandy’s slouching and in the upper left corner a young woman is carried out, overcome by excitement. The mini-dramas taking place within the groups of figures gathered, their exaggerated poses and expressions, exemplifies the tradition of British caricature as a blend of art, social observation and moral commentary which Rowlandson helped shape.

The foyer is the public room of the Little Theatre in the Hay, the building Samuel Foote had bought from John Potter and reopened as the Theatre Royal on 14 May 1767, and which the elder George Colman had enlarged and refitted on his purchase of the patent in 1777. The building itself would be pulled down in 1820 to make way for John Nash’s present Theatre Royal, opened a few yards south on 4 July 1821, and the present drawing is among the very few that record the original interior.

The theatre was a favoured subject for Rowlandson, providing a ready environment for applying his satirical sense of humour. From the same year as the present work, Rowlandson also produced The Prospect Before Us (etchings within Royal Collection and V&A Museum); Chaos is Come Again (Metropolitan Museum of Art etching) and A Gaming Table at Devonshire House (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), portraying Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire gambling in Devonshire House.

Rowlandson had established the genre of theatrical satire some years earlier with comparable works such as Box-Lobby Loungers (1785, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), etched and published in January 1786. It includes the figure of Colonel George Hanger, later Lord Coleraine, identified by the heavy club known as ‘Supple Jack’ carried under his arm; Hanger reappears in the present work, as the lean upright figure with a cane standing second in from the left. His reappearance is consistent with Rowlandson’s practice of carrying favoured types from one composition to another. Also from circa 1785 is An Audience Watching a Play at Drury Lane Theatre (Yale Center for British Art) depicting an audience seated within the theatre, more interested in each other than the performance and, in turn, the performers themselves rather than the actors.

The present watercolour was first held by Henry Graves of Pall Mall, the 19th century print-seller and dealer at 6 Pall Mall. It then passed into the collection of Alfred Morrison (1821–1897) at Fonthill House, the surviving wing that remained of Alderman William Beckford’s Fonthill Splendens completed in 1770, largely demolished by his son for his famous Gothic revival, Fonthill Abbey, built nearby. Morrison was the second son of the textile millionaire James Morrison and inherited Fonthill Estate in 1857 and £750,000 in stocks and shares. He assembled one of the great gentlemen-collector’s gatherings of the later Victorian period: Persian carpets, Greek antiquities, Chinese porcelain, miniatures, autograph letters, sculpture and contemporary pictures by Frederic, Lord Leighton and John Brett. The collection of Rowlandson drawings passed through three generations of descent before being offered as part of the Alfred Morrison Collection at Christie’s in 2006.