Surrey Institution: Interior of the Rotunda with F. Accum Lecturing

A coloured aquatint by J. C. Stadler after Thomas Rowlandson and A. C. Pugin shows the Surrey Institution's circular lecture hall packed with Regency-era Londoners: fashionably dressed women fill the floor seats, men crowd the balustraded gallery above, and chemist Friedrich Accum holds court at a demonstration table on the right. Rowlandson's characteristic handling of crowd types is present — plump matrons, preening dandies, craning spectators — though this plate leans toward topographical record rather than savage ridicule. It belongs to the illustrated-London genre Rowlandson and Pugin produced for Ackermann's Microcosm of London (1808–10), a direct ancestor of sequential pictorial storytelling: page-by-page urban scenes, consistent viewpoint, narrative detail in every corner — the visual grammar comic artists would later inherit.