Thames Map: Works Thames Map: Walks Polluted Landscapes Tate Boat

Wapping

These three figures are sitting on the balcony of the Angel Inn in London's docklands. The woman is a prostitute, and is apparently taunting the sailor on the right; the man in the middle may be a pimp.

Nineteenth-century Wapping was a grimy, seedy place. Victorians frequently linked the stench of the Thames, polluted with waste and excrement, with moral degradation. But Whistler describes his figures with a detached observation which deliberately avoids moralising. His choice of such a modern life subject reflects the influence of the revolutionary painter, Gustave Courbet, whose work he'd seen in Paris a few years earlier.

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James McNeill Whistler Wapping 1860-4
Oil on canvas Lent by the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. John Hay Whitney Collection, 1982

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