Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker Ltd

  • Pencil on laid paper with fragmentary watermark
  • 7 ¼ × 9 ½ inches · 185 × 243 mm
  • Inscribed: Lazy folk take most pains
    Unframed

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  • From an album formed by George Ashburnham, Viscount St Asaph (1785-1813)

This wry drawing illustrates a traditional proverb, that ‘Lazy folk take most pains.’ It is part of a sequence that George Dance made poking fun at the foibles of human nature. Here, a man seated close to a table set with a bottle and glass evidently has tried to reach and pull the bell chord without getting out of his chair, as a result, Dance shows him falling from the chair.

George Dance, the son of a successful architect, also George, and brother to the painter Nathaniel, was himself an accomplished and celebrated architect. A founder member of the Royal Academy, Dance was also a fluent and prolific draughtsman. Dance never let architecture dominate his life. He was a man of wide-ranging interests, and in later years he gained greater satisfaction from arts other than architecture. He possessed considerable musical skill as an instrumentalist and composer: Haydn became a valued friend. His interest in drawing also grew: his distinctive and highly finished pencil profile portraits constituted a vivid gallery of Regency London's artistic establishment of the day, and etchings after them by William Daniell were published in 1804–14. Simultaneously, Dance delighted in producing humorous cartoons and caricatures and a sizeable body of his amusing drawings survives.