Boxing Match for 200 Guineas between Dutch Sam and Medley

This match caused immense excitement. Medley, who never entered the prize-ring for a stake, challenged Sam as a result of a dispute. Sam started favourite but was knocked down in the first round. After a tremendous blow on the head from Sam, Medley fought bravely on. By the 16th round his face was in a terrible state and he repeatedly fell from exhaustion but continued to fight for 33 more rounds until his brother intervened to declare him conquered. Sam displayed great skill and his mercy to his brave opponent in the last round was much admired. Ben Medley was chosen as one of the pugilistic pages at the coronation of George IV.

Thomas Rowlandson was born in London in 1756. When his father was in financial difficulties, an uncle (a Spitalfields silk weaver) and aunt took care of him as a boy and his younger sister. When Thomas was eight years old his then widowed aunt moved to Soho and he was sent to Dr Barwis’s School. He was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools in 1775, in which year two of his ‘serious’ pictures were accepted at the annual exhibition. He received a silver medal for his work at the Schools in 1777. Subsequently he paid visits to France and possibly Italy although the circumstances of these are not clear. In 1784 he exhibited his compositions titled Vauxhall Gardens and The Serpentine River at the Academy, both works showing how much he had achieved by the age of twenty-eight. On the death of his aunt, Rowlandson soon wasted half a fortune which she had left him in what we now look upon as a happily reckless life of gambling and high living among like-minded friends, interspersed with times of concentrated work for publishers to make ends meet. Between 1798 and 1822, Rudolph Ackermann employed him in illustrating many of the colour-plate books he was then publishing. Rowlandson was also working for a hack publisher, Thomas Tegg of Cheapside, from 1807. Little is known of Rowlandson’s life after 1824. He became ill at the age of sixty-eight, probably after a stroke, and died in London two years later on 22 April 1827.