Society itself has always been seen as Vanity Fair, with every quirk and idiocy held up to ridicule. The 18th-century fashion for vertiginous hairstyles, dandyish "Macaronis", the fat and the thin, false teeth and quack cures were all fit subjects for the inventive nib. Sex, of course, is a bottomless well and in the eye-wateringly graphic inventions of Thomas Rowlandson it found a brilliant interpreter. But Rowlandson shows too that comic art is almost never high art. His cartoon of a group of lascivious old men dribblingly studying the nether regions of a naked girl in the pose of an upside-down cyclist is really a version of the theme of Susanna and the Elders but its explicitness and the removal of the Biblical fig leaf make it irredeemably low.
If the national coin is marked with a robust humour on one side, then vulgarity and viciousness mark the reverse: it is an uncomfortable truth that this exhibition does not seek to examine. What it shows instead is British life as carnival and, like a carnival, it may not always be very edifying but it is entertaining.
Art from slightly below the salt is also the subject of the Dulwich Picture Gallery's latest piece of imaginative exhibition making, The Wyeth Family: Three Generations of American Art (until 22 August). This examination of the painterly dynasty starts with the magazine and book illustrator N. C. Wyeth (1882-1945), moves on to his son Andrew — an unfashionable but significant figure in post-war American art — and then to Andrew's sister Henriette and his son Jamie. For all the century and more timescale, the Wyeths share a family sensibility. They are storytellers and artistically their nation is demonstrably that of Winslow Homer, Grant Wood and Edward Hopper (although they do not hit the same heights).
The family was descended from old New England stock and their pictures, whether N. C.'s illustrations of US Marines or square-jawed fishermen, Andrew's solitary figures adrift in the Maine landscape, and Jamie's surreal and sometimes sinister images of Halloween pumpkin fields and rural dreamscapes, all share a fine, illustrative technique. They all show a concern with realism, and above all with the vastness of America and its historical footings.
Andrew aside, they have no great claim to pre-eminence, but collectively their work chronicles something of America's own journey from a wholesome pre-war groundedness through post-war alienation to a knowing modernity. If Rude Britannia offers a version of how we see ourselves, then the Wyeths offer a distinctive all-American family's own view of their homeland.
