The Reviewers' Cave

Mortimer's dynamic early pen-work is used here to develop a frontispiece for Lloyd Evans's "The Powers of the Pen: A Poem" (1768), a verse satire aimed at literary critics. The artist also etched the related print, and mined Alexander Pope’s "Dunciad" and "Rape of the Lock" for suitable imagery, with the rocky setting suggested by the latter's "Cave of Spleen." The drawing consists of two sections, with judges seated at right, one in the front row resembling Samuel Johnson, whose pomposity Evans lampoons. As workers bring in bushel baskets of books to be reviewed, a corpulent figure on a dais presides over an assemblage that includes a braying donkey. Above, Dullness lolls on clouds near flayed faces, or masks, hung from cords. At left, Mortimer sketched ideas for the main design. His rare working drawing engages with a distinct British type of visual satire that combines allegory, caricature and visual-verbal punning, a mode that Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray would take up in the 1780s.