Thames Map: Works
Thames Map: Walks
Polluted Landscapes
Tate Boat
Pool of London
Whistler's Thames Etchings:
Black Lion Wharf
Responding to Charles Baudelaire's call for artists to find inspiration in modern cities, Whistler focused on the Thames. Despite the health hazards of such a polluted river, he stayed at a pub in Wapping during 1859, so that he could have easy access to London's docklands. He chose sites which were threatened by the creation of the river embankment, and began recording their vanishing 'beauties'.
Baudelaire greatly admired these prints when they were exhibited in Paris in 1862. He described them as 'representing the banks of the Thames: wonderful tangles of rigging, yardarms and rope, a hotchpotch of fog, furnaces and corkscrews of smoke: the profound and intricate poetry of a vast capital'.
These etchings established Whistler's reputation in Britain, France and America, and, like Turner before him, linked his name inextricably with the Thames.
See also the Thames etching Billingsgate.
James McNeill Whistler
Black Lion Wharf 1859
Etching on paper.
Lent by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Gift of Sir Edmund Walker Estate, 1926
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The Pool of London
This view looks upstream from beside the Tower of London. The building on the right is the Customs House; the church tower belongs to St Magnus the Martyr, and the smaller tower to the left is part of Billingsgate fish market. The Pool of London was the focus of London's maritime trading activities, described in contemporary guidebooks as containing ships from 'every corner of the globe'.
Monet describes the foreground elements quite crisply, but the misty background is treated in broad, simple sweeps of paint
Claude Monet
The Pool of London 1871
Oil on canvas.
Lent by the National Museums and Galleries of Wales, Cardiff
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