Fairlop Fair, Essex

Thomas Rowlandson

ca. 1816 · Pen and brown and gray inks, with watercolor · Drawings and Prints

Rowlandson here depicts a country road packed with wagons and pedestrians, the scene observed by cottagers at left. Three versions of the composition are known, one with a sign over the cottage door inscribed "Fairlop Fair, Essex." This annual event originated as a meal hosted each July by a London engineer, Daniel Day (1683–1767). The latter centered on a huge five hundred year old tree, the Fairlop oak, in Hainault Forest. Traders with stalls came to serve the crowd and, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the "fair" drew close to a hundred thousand. In June 1805, the oak caught fire and by 1820 it had blown down. In this drawing, Rowlandson represents the tree as a leafless silhouette standing at the center of a distant field.

Artist

Thomas Rowlandson

Date

ca. 1816

Medium

Pen and brown and gray inks, with watercolor

Department

Drawings and Prints

Credit line

Rogers Fund, 1908