The River Thames and its Architecture - Professor Simon Thurley

well good evening ladies and gentlemen I'm very excited that I'm being live-streamed it's a new experience for me so welcome to you all and welcome to everybody else out there in the ether who is who is listening I've obviously obviously always thrilled to give a lecture for Gresham College and I have to say though that I am a little bit anxious tonight I was rather alarmed when Valerie asked me to give a lecture about the River Thames not only because it's such an absolutely colossal e large subject but also because for I think for this audience it might be quite a familiar one and so I've been racking my brains to think how I could say something that be really new and interesting and get a new angle on the river this evening and what I've decided to do is give a slightly experimental lecture if that's all right Valerie I'm going to be talking about the Thames in this architecture of course but what I want to do it I want to see if I can do it exclusively through the eyes of those people who over the centuries have recorded it in pen pencil ink and paint starting in the 15th century and coming right up to the present day and I found this an extremely interesting and actually rather revealing exercise because what it shows is that as the nature of London has changed so the way it has been recorded changed and that recording in itself has helped fashion people's image and understanding of the city so tonight we will obviously be looking at the physicality of the river and their buildings around it but also I shall be making some observations about what those buildings and the way the river changed and how these things contributed to the evolving image of London you know no matter how much we know about London and its history it's still hard I think to take our minds right the way back to the reason why this place was first founded but it is of course an inescapable fact that the reason we are here tonight is because of the River Thames it was the Thames that encouraged the Romans to settle here in a forty-three it was the Thames that provided their drinking water it provided their sanitation and most importantly it provided the route for their trade and therefore their prosperity the Romans built the first port of London and since then I think with very little interruption London has remained a major trading centre long before the great docks were built in the 19th century the pool of London was already the hub of European and eventually world trade and these facts all of them are fundamental to London's existence as we shall see this evening the thames importance has been and remains multi-faceted until the 17th century it was the transport artery of the capital roads were narrow dirty crowded poorly maintained and often impossible to get from one part of London to another really the only practical way if you were going east-west or in some parts north-south - was by using the river and we also have to remember this is a fundamental fact so easy to forget that there was only one bridge if you wanted to cross to the other side of the Thames at any other point than London Bridge you had to take a boat and this total reliance on river transport for moving east west north or south meant that the river was crowded with vessels carrying people and goods and the Waterman had a stranglehold over the economy and smooth running of London they plied their tribe their trade at night and day to keep the river moving so it is not surprising that when the first artists turn to depict this great city the Thames was omnipresent this is one of the very first images we have that captures London and it's River it's a late 15th century miniature found in the poems of Charles Duke of all young who you see here incarcerated in the Tower of London but much more importantly for our purposes this evening this isn't only the earliest depiction of the Tower it is the earliest depiction of the river and we can see here this incredibly interesting and accurate view the artist has Illustrated very carefully the effect of the constraint caused by the narrow arches of London Bridge showing the the rapids that were effectively created under the bridge that had to be shot by the Waterman in there where is but this view that was taken in about 1500 can be supplemented by the work of the Antwerp artist Anthony van den VIN Gaza between 1539 and 1544 he produced 14 large pen-and-ink sketches of London between Westminster and Greenwich which are now in the Ashmolean museum this work was never engraved in his lifetime it was commissioned by a Philip of Spain to create a great mural of London to paint on the walls of the Spanish royal palaces but this commissioned as far as we know was never completed and therefore vin Gardez work constitutes the earliest known attempt at a detailed topographical study of London recording everything the monastic foundations Royal Palaces courtier mansions warehouses wharves and center stage in all of this is the river vin Garda is the first London artist who gives us any real understanding of the topography of the river and its extraordinary importance for the city and his drawings as you can see can tell you've got you've got some Paul's Cathedral in the middle of here and tell us a huge amount of lund about London in the early 16th century but VIN Gerda is also important because he begins to focus move our focus from the city because his views encompassed all the royal palaces both on the Thames and Offutt and so here we have his fantastic drawing of Hampton taken from the river this drawing is it's about this long it's a really really big thing and what it shows us is the intimate relationship that Hampton Court had with the Thames because this structure here the Thames water gate a large building which contains steps which led up from water level up into it and allowed the Kings barge to be rode downriver from Westminster and more inside this to allow the king and the Queen and his chosen friends to dismount in the dry enter this building and then move fire passage covered passages through the gardens up to the palace and this water gate you see here is just one of maybe 30 or 40 such water gates that dotted the river side from Westminster through the city every major house along the river from the Middle Ages up until the Civil War had such a water entrance now Bing Garda stands alone in the 16th century as a chronicler of London and the Thames but his mantle was inherited in the 17th century by fenceless 'less Hollow he was the second person to create a great panorama of the city the hiring by the Earl of Arundel of Halle comes at a turning point in the recording of the image of London Halle entered the service of Arlington soon after they had met in Prague in 1635 and he was settled at his patrons residence Arlington House which was one of the Strand palaces with a river frontage at the time that Halle took up residence in London the topographical scene was still dominated by foreigners particularly the Dutch and the flemish all of whom favored depicting london from the top of what is now southern fatal with the thames running in front of it like a ribbon now this example i show you here which is very typical is one that's actually here in the Museum of London now the prominence of this view from Southwark Cathedral there is Southwark Cathedral here was almost certainly I think because this was the principal point of entry to the Capitol from visitors who were coming up from Kent's if you landed and Dover you get transported from Dover up through Kent and you'd enter London through Southwark it was also important because it was in Southwark that most painters settled because the City of London of course was controlled by the monopolistic craft guilds and you couldn't establish yourself as a painter in London because you'd be it would be illegal and say you stayed in Southwark and so Southwark became this great view of London catching the great the great sweep of the river in front of the city now statistically the number of early views from this angle is absolutely staggering and when Haller first came to London it was from this angle that he drew it and this is his view in 1647 his panorama and to create this holler made hundreds of individual sketches and drawings most of which are now lost but a careful examination of this view reveals how extraordinarily accurate it was in fact is made of up of six individual printed plates and just to go into a bit of detail this is one of those plates the one on the furthest right so we're looking at the plate here and you can see the extraordinarily detailed topographical observation that he brought but more importantly this evening you can see that the river absolutely dominates the view it is the principal source of interest here crowded with all these boats here in the pool of London and the imagery and here you have Neptune sitting on this great this great plinth here with the River Thames pouring out of one of his big jars and the river is the focus of this great long view as it was known but it was also Haller who made the first image of London from the West standing on the roof of Arlington House and he followed this up immediately after this is the civil war with this astonishing bird's eye view of the Strand and Covent Garden this is a completely new way of looking at London and the river and in my view this is the great tragic lost image of the 17th century it is the only surviving impression of what must have been a much bigger project to map the whole of the city in minut detail and of course we only have this plate and so we can't see how the river would have been including it but here you can see the the sweep of the river in front of Somerset House and Aaron Loup house nearby so the emergence of new viewpoints of London gradually began to change perceptions of the river and of the city by 1600 all painters wishing to depict London showed it as a water-based City rather than one that was essentially land-based and until the 1720s the presence of the River Thames seemed so essential to painters that the majority of close-up views of the Capitol were all centered on waterfront sites during the 17th century views of the great London buildings the Royal Palaces and Paul's Cathedral Lambeth Palace are all from the river so let's have a look at a few here is Richmond palace we've gone right up stream here to Richmond and you can see the Royal Palace here you can see a sort of social scene in the front but absolutely dominating of the composition is the the ribbon of the river that runs through it this is in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge here is Somerset house by Cornelius Bowl painting dating for about 16 60s and Dulwich picture gallery this of course in 1660 is the the house of the Queens of England the Palace of the Queens of England incredibly important building but again the the vast majority of this painting is dominated by the river and even at the end of the century this is a painting that was taken in about 1705 bine if this is NIF's painting of Windsor Castle you can see again the image is entirely dominated by the snaking River Thames dominated by pictures of barges and carrying goods upstream carrying goods westwards and so it is extremely difficult during this period to find close-up views of people the river streets quarters and landmarks of the Capitol the the the the Thames actually dominates here is an unusual exception this is this fantastic view of the River Thames frozen over in front of London Bridge dating from the freezing-cold year of 1677 some of you here may remember it and very unusually we we see Londoners skating snow balling this fellow I'm not quite sure what his day he's shooting a bird probably one of the getting rid of one of the pigeons and you can see a sort of social scene but that way of using the river as a way of portraying a social scene is quite unusual it does give us some wonderful topographical details it of course gives us London Bridge it gives us what is now southern cathedral and it gives us Swan steps one of the many many series of steps on the side of the river that allowed you to go down and take your barge at any time of tides because of course the tides might be up here or the tide might be down there and of course there the important point to note about this is that the river froze upstream of London Bridge because the narrowness and the constriction that the bridge created slowed down the river enough for it to freeze up stream below stream and it didn't it didn't in fact freeze so we're in the 17th century and the Great Fire of London provided an extraordinary challenge to artists who wished to continue to depict the Capitol there were a whole series of paintings that illustrate the disaster and of course most of them are taken from or next door to the river here is a wonderful painting of the disaster again in the Museum of London's collection here in this building this was painted from a boat all of the viewpoint of a boat in the middle of the the pool of London in front of Tower Wharf sometime between eight and nine o'clock the evening of Thursday the 14th of September 1666 and as far as we can judge what it shows is amazingly accurate really quite a rarity from a 17th century view the artist has shown the way that the arches and the bridge were in fact irregular which they were and that they were pointed not round which they were he also shows details of the Tower of London with extraordinary and accuracy I mean even Haller was the master of detail in his long view misinterprets the shape of the towers in the white tower that this painter gets right in the midst of all this catastrophe and conflagration well as today one of the most animated topics of conversation and one of the perhaps biggest frustrations of being a Londoner was transport the invention of the Pomeranian carriage in the seventeenth-century had caused a revolution of transportation in London suddenly for the first time it became comfortable to travel by coach thanks to the new suspension of the Pomeranian carriages before these things were invented if you got into a carriage you would basically be beaten to a pulp as it went over there Ruxandra khals in the roads but the Pommery Pomeranian carriage slung on large straps of leather allowed you to gracefully knock your head against the side of the carriage rather than just being hurled against it violently first the monarchy then the nobility and then the gentry began to move around London by Road and as a consequence the great houses of the nobility were redesigned to have their principal entrances on the land Woodside so that visitors could arrive by carriage and the importance of the old river water gates and we looked at one a few moments ago at Hampton Court rapidly declined in fact these water gates were very quickly relegated to become ways of getting goods in rather than the principal way that you came in all your fancy finery to visit the the owners this change but between water and land transport set up the great 17th century battle between the Waterman and the carriage owners rather like the RMT Union the Waterman could hold London to ransom but the coming of the carriage fatally weakened their influence or did it paintings like this one the Thames at Horseferry painted 1706 210 again here in the Museum of London shows that even for the owner of a coach and pair you were at the mercy of the Waterman because we have to remember there was still only one bridge and if you wanted to get your carriage across the river at Westminster or here at Lambeth and this is the bottom of Horseferry Road which of course is why Horseferry Road is called Horseferry Road you had to take your horse and on the horse ferry across to Lambeth Palace and here you see the carriage precariously balancing in fact this is a carriage that has come from Lambeth and is just about to get off in Westminster and you can still see the at this end of the river that the huge amount of traffic that's still going on I'm rather intrigued by the naked bathers here on this punt who seemed to be quite a feature knowing that the River Thames was not only a source of drinking water but also the main sewer of lund and I think bathing in it perhaps was not so much fun but anyway they obviously thought it was well what particularly I think focused artists attention on the subject of the river during the 18th century was the construction of new bridges since the building of London Bridge in the 12th century as we've observed there was only one of them but in response to growing criticisms about the overcrowding of London Bridge the capital acquired a further four bridges during the Georgian period respectively Putney bridge opened in 1729 Westminster Bridge built between 1739 and 1750 Blackfriars Bridge between 1760 and 1769 and Battersea Bridge in 1771 - - but the erection of Westminster Bridge I think was the major public building project of mid 18th century London the need for an alternative conduit for commerce transport and a communication to the dilapidated and overcrowded London bridge had been voiced for years however in the end it was a collection of civic-minded and commercially astute members of the westminster elite who organized political action on the matter meeting regularly at the horn Tapan in new palace yard they succeeded in provoking parliamentary legislation this society of gentlemen as they were called lobbied for and helped to ensure the passage of a bridge-building bill in 1736 a body of nearly 200 commissioners was set up to supervise proceedings and in 1738 work began according to a plan executed by charles la belly a Swiss engineer who subsequently managed the project until its completion in 1750 the scheme for this new bridge met with sustained and vociferous opposition from the beginning petitions to the Parliament from the Lord Mayor the aldermen and the Commons of the City of London complained that their traditional status as the commercial guardians of the river would be undermined and the trade and jobs would be sucked out of the East End of the Capitol you can imagine that the dis consent voiced by our friends the Thames Waterman was even more acute by its defenders the bridge was described as a testament to a modern ideal of civic enlightenment for the entrepreneurial aristocrats who created it it was both a monument to their civic responsibility but also a flamboyantly modern fixture in the metropolitan environment of commerce the bridges uncluttered neo Palladian design with its gently curved facade gleaming white Portland stone and subtle neoclassical detail linked it to ideas of antique culture celebrated in terms of patrician value social order and physical rationality the monumental scale of the technological intervention it necessitated dominated the discussion about the bridge as it emerged out of the water crowds of people came to stare and to boating to around its environs which temporally offered a lucrative if ominous new business opportunity the Waterman became an essential part of the polite tourist circuit of the city now it's been established that almost all of Canaletto 's early english patrons were commissioners of westminster bridge in particular the artist executed a series of paintings and drawings for sir hugh Smithson a leading voice in the Society of gentleman and an active member of the Board of Commissioners through the project and here you see that absolutely sensational painting by Canaletto London seen through an arch of Westminster Bridge this is his first painting for Smithson and in it the artist clearly redeveloped many of the conventions of his Venetian River views many of which you can see at the moment in the Queen's gallery where they are pretty sensationally on show the city is depicted as an assemblage of architectural landmarks and the importance of the bridge in the view can hardly be overstated it is the focus of the painting and what we're looking at here is the timber centering of the bridge onto which the the stone arches were built and of course when the mortar had gone off the centering was removed and I absolutely loved the way he's included a bucket hanging on a piece of string here just to show that this bit this bridge is in the process the process of being unconstructed and westminster bridge thanks to Canaletto and thanks to the determination of the Society of gentlemen to promote this great Civic act of beautification spawned a whole school of painting and here you see that fantastic painting in the Tate Gallery this is Samuel Scott you can see we're now sort of finishing touches of the bridge again echoing canaletto very dramatic view looking through the the arches and capturing the the monuments of London in the in the background the bridge became to be a symbol of London's new neoclassical image and these two extraordinary views of the Thames both in the Royal Collection both by can arrest Canaletto capture this sort of neoclassical view of London in its canonical form and you can see the way the river is absolutely dominant and in it the bright sunlight exposes every detail of the city's topography and suggests a clarity of vision and understanding indeed a sort of a state of enlightenment for the Age of Enlightenment on these canvases nowhere to be seen are London's mists and folks this is transparent space and perspective and you can read these as metaphors of freedom and order London is shown here as nowhere else as the modern Rome and Sint Paul's Westminster Abbey in Westminster Bridge are the great monuments of an imperial city so here is Canaletto again this is Lord Mayor's day painted in 1747 it's now a paper painting now in Prague and in water painting what a painting and what a painting that that helps you understand the importance of London and the importance to the river of London which is really quite extraordinary and again this is an imperial city the Lord Mayor's barge there in the middle and surely here Canaletto was dreaming of the regattas and the dookle festivities in Venice and I just wonder whether this slightly calls into question the reality of the scene maybe like the Queen's Golden Jubilee it was actually pouring with rain and everyone was soaking wet but of course Canaletto z' viewpoint here which was chosen by many other painters was blocked by 1769 by Blackfriars Bridge because bridges continued to be built and here is William Marlowe's wonderful painting of 1775 taken from that spot this is now at Yale in America and the new bridge is in the center and for all in purpose all intents and purposes it shows a completely different city to that which was depicted by Canaletto the coloring is more muted the river of course is emptier perhaps all more representative of the everyday light and Colour of the Thames river skate in the right you can just about over every here you know commercial vessels which were not depicted by Canaletto this isn't Canaletto x' river of pageantry and light it is the everyday river of life and of labour and here ladies and gentlemen we start to see the gradual but decisive shift in London's image away from this idealized neoclassical capital to the industrial engine house of the world you see generally speaking the more industrial parts of the Thames were not painted by painters of the 18th century as they rather ill-fitted the classical image of this Imperial City but when painters did venture into the shipbuilding heartland of the river their focus was not the river itself nor its architectural setting it was so this is this is another view I would have just be sad there's another view of William Marla and you kenick you can see the move away from Canaletto here there's much grittier much more realistic view of the river and when they left the central stretches and went to the more industrial areas painters focused on on the ships and this is John cleverly the elders painting of HMS Buckingham on the stocks a Deptford and wonderful picture I suspect the scale of it is probably right you know all this stuff here was under the water and so it probably was up that high and incredible and actually typical product of the 18th century views of the shipyards which concentrated on ship launches so now it's time to move on from the 18th century and as we do I want you to notice that what is particularly interesting about early the early 19th century is the abandonment of the sort of Italian influence in the painting of the Capitol and a return to the Netherland --is-- influence that we saw right at the beginning of my talk there were perhaps two reasons for this London was now the leading mercantile city of the world and unlike Italian painting the Netherland --is-- school faithfully and proudly recorded industry and commerce and it was perhaps for this reason that collectors in London in the early 19th century started to buy dutch works and put them on display interest was I think particularly stimulated by access to to collections rich in Dutch art that of the Marquess of Stafford shown at Cleveland House and just little later the collection of Sir Francis bourgeois which was shown in Britain's first purpose-built picture gallery in Dulwich where you can still of course see it today but in 1814 royal favor was granted to this fashion by the Prince Regent who brought one of the great one of the greatest I think masterpieces this is albert pipes the passage boat boat now in the Royal Collection so there's this move away towards the Netherland --is-- influence and when we look at Augustus wall coal cuts mid channel view of the pool of London painted in 1816 we can see how this work is very clearly I think influenced by Coit and shows fishermen at work next to something that looks very much like a sort of Dutch barge the painting is serene but it hardly I think reflects what we know of the pool of London which was at that time the world's busiest port for this reason the Netherlands influence is seen most strongly and successfully I think in paintings of the Thames Estuary and here the focus of the painters brush moves from the social and the architectural setting of the Thames to the raw River and see here is Clark's and Stanfield Tilbury fort winds against the tide this gives us I think one of the most dramatic renderings of the Thames Estuary this is a whacking great picture it's six foot by five foot and it was presented to the rail Pyatt pioneer Robert Stevenson on his retirement from the Northwest Railway was finished in 18-49 and was exhibited at the Royal Academy where it was particularly admired for this extraordinary treatment of them swell of the river and in this picture you capture an extraordinary slice of the history of the Thames because here you see in this left-hand corner a small fishing boat known as a Peter boat there's another one just up here you might not be able to see it but this Peter boat is directly in the path of a massive Thames sailing barge transporting a huge load of hay and that the Thames barge is tacking into the wind and it's on an absolute direct collision course with the peter boat and you can see the fishermen here shouting at this fisherman here sorry I'm shouting you know we're gonna be run down you can't shout shout motor gives way to sale because they've both sale and here you've got a ferry boat going across the river you've got this huge amount of activity in the one thing stable in the picture is the great gate of tilbury fort built for charles ii is great magnificent fort on the site of the place where Queen Elizabeth gave her famous rousing speech for the Spanish Armada now the important point about this painting and paintings like it is the deep knowledge of sailing the sea and ships that are painting like this required Britain was this great naval nation and London was the headquarters of of the of the of the Merchant Navy fleet and obviously with the pool of London and the Tower of London of the Royal Navy as well and stanfield like many other painters of his time were also experienced seamen in fact as a young man he'd worked on Thames Colliers and East Indiaman and for a short period he was even in the Royal Navy so a painter like that would have actually understood the skilled seaman ship necessary to sail in the squally Thames Estuary but of course we shouldn't forget that however accurate and precisely observed these sailing vessels were the power of these paintings lie in the brilliant handling of the raw elements of water and wind clucks and Stansfield was a master of capturing the power of the sea and so of course was JMW Turner Turner too was very familiar with the Thames Estuary and with the technicalities of shipbuilding he regularly stayed at Margate and went on boat trips in the estuary to sketch the landscape and here we have his fishing on the Blythe sand tide setting in which is in a taped gallery now and it shows the tide coming in over the sand banks and the fishing boats gather to fish and the far distance the landmass of the Isle of Sheppey and it was on the way back from one of his trips to Margate when Turner spied the temeraire the second ship in the line at Trafalgar being towed from Sheerness to the Breakers yard at Rotherhithe of course this incredibly famous Thames painting perhaps was the most famous of all in the National Gallery painted in 1839 and as the great famous in its day ship makes it slow progress to its grave the Sun sets over the still waters creating this incredibly well-known image not only of the Thames but of a British warship but none of this concentration on the Thames Estuary and on sailing and on the ships is to say that the magic central London views were ignored and in particular the bridges continued to exercise an extraordinary fascination for painters and engravers new bridges were opened with alarming regularity during the 19th century Vauxhall and Waterloo opened in 1811 Southwark in 1819 Hammersmith in 1827 Chelsea in 1858 Lambeth in 1862 and this is extraordinary the rapidity that this is happening Wandsworth and Albert in 1873 and finally Tower Bridge in 1894 and every one of these provided an impetus and and inspiration so the Strand bridge now named Waterloo Bridge was unquestionably the grandest and most important bridge opening of the early 19th century and here we have constables astonishing view of the opening day his largest his most ambitious work again it's absolutely enormous and it was only exhibited 15 years after the actual event that took place on the 18th of June 1817 this is about seven foot that I mention here and what you see in the foreground here is a royal barge and George the fourth is just about to get into it so the Prince Regent is just about to get into it and here we have a direct connection back to Canaletto but this is not Canaletto x' view this is not the venetian bright sunlight this is dirty grimy smoky London a place of ceaseless turmoil and activity and Industry and energy and activity this is a place that we recognize as London a tough industrial city not a place of untrammeled and perhaps imagined elegance and peace a completely different style of work two constables with nearly the same viewpoint is Charles Dean's painting of the newly completed Waterloo Bridge painted only four years later in 1821 this shows a much stiller river with a fashionable party here about to embark on a boat trip perhaps to go upriver to admire the beauties of the new bridge this though of course is still the river of Industry and the Waterman who you see here you see one of them but there are others in the painting here there's another one waiting down here the Waterman were of course the people who were threatened by the buildings of these new bridges and the lifting of the crossing tolls but their livelihoods amazing me continued into the Victorian period and were finally really only swept away with the creation of the embankments now the embankments were just one of a number of changes along the river that during the third quarter of the 19th century began to transform the opportunities presented to painters and the image of the industrial capital the Thames embankment were of course designed and executed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette the chief engineer to the Metropolitan Board of Works built between 1868 and 1874 they were as you know named Victoria Albert and Chelsea and they extended for the length of about three and a half miles and their principal effect was to reclaim about 32 acres of mud and foreshore some of the most painted parts of the river landscape and the parts of the river that emphasised the dirty muddy industrial nature of it so here you have John O'Connor's view of York Watergate before the construction of the embankment this is a reasonably high tide at low tide all this area here of course is mud and slime and dirt and here is its extraordinary survival it still survives of course in the embankment gardens today I'm going to see it with a funny little a Halfmoon shape of water around it one of the last surviving Thames water gates but here it stands before the construction of the embankment and here is O'Connor's view of more or less the same area after the conspiration this is painted in 1873 and this scene celebrates the prosperity of the city in the the well-dressed people who were parading up and down this absolutely new embankment of how small the trees are here all just recently planted these are spectators in a modern well administered clean London and here you have order and Empire represented in a detachment of guards marching along there recently in built Road and here we have the ultimate portrayal of Victorian confidence in what was now not an imagined imperial city it was truly an imperial city a place improved by money by know-how a place improved by technical innovation epitomized by this this road which of course contained also a sewer and an underground railway following the completion of the embankments the Victorian art journal remarked and I quote the opening of the Thames embankment has for the first time convinced many of us to the claims of London to architectural beauty but the other great change to the Victorian River scape in the Victorian period was of course the construction of the houses of parliament in 1834 there was devastating fire at the old Palace of Westminster which destroyed almost everything apart from Westminster Hall and this of course led to the famous competition to design the new home which was won by Charles Barry foundation stone was laid in 1840 and finally the the clock tower containing the the Bell Big Ben which we all know about now silenced by Teresa may the least of her crimes was finally completed in 1858 and both the fire that destroyed the old palace and the finished building were tremendous inspiration to painters and of course we have these two incredible views one of which I show you them my favorite one here and this view by Turner of the destruction of the Palace of Westminster with Westminster Bridge I'm an absolute complete work of genius and then David Roberts that immaculate immaculate painter recording the the new palace as it's completed a painting done in 1834 so the Victorians created a new river skate and this river scape was one that was recorded by a new generation of painters and one of the most famous painters who came to record it and the painter who perhaps made it most famous was of course Claude Monet and here we see this painting in the National Gallery entitled the Thames below Westminster painted in about 1872 this seems incredibly familiar to us but what we have to remember was that when Moni painted it this was brand-new everything in this view was new the embankment had opened the previous year Westminster Bridge in 1872 that the new bridge in 1872 because of course the original was replaced the houses of parliament in 1858 and since Thomas's Hospital which you can see on the left-hand side that blob over there over there in 1871 this is an entirely new London that Monet is painting and with Monet we see that during the last quarter of the 19th century there's an emergence of a whole new set of painterly concerns that affected the way that the river was depicted the pursuit of the real the reality of the river and the reality of what a painters were seeing led high Victorian artists to devise opposing methods of representation and we can see perhaps polarization of techniques in the work of two contemporary French painters both of whom painted the River Thames they are Monet and James T so so here is Monet's the Thames and the houses of parliament and here is T so DH on the Thames their contemporaries from the same country now although these works look very very different they both share the same subject a perspective view of the London Riverside the predominance of figures and this painting by T so almost to the exclusion of the river invites us to consider the almost total absence of people in the Impressionists views of London and here the favorite elements were the river and the parks the Impressionists fascination with the river was crucial I think in maintaining the Thames as a center of painterly concern for the next 60 years this is all river and all light and T so Spain ting is full of painstaking details of costumes a dog a picnic hamper bottles of champagne you know I mean it's all there to be seen this is indeed full of what Ruskin was to call the mere colour photographs of vulgar society now we don't know whether Monet met James McNeill Whistler during his time in London in 1872 71 but it's certain that the Thames views of the two painters share certain characteristics particularly these grates of liquid sweeps of paint and sky and river Whistler used to be rode up and down Chelsea reach at night by his assistant and this is whistlers painting he called it a Nocturne blue and gold old Battersea Bridge as its title and the picture gives us a view of the bridge looking through the arches this is the same technique as canaletto developed at a Chelsea old church of course there in the distance but of course what dominates is the river the mist and the looming industrial structure of the bridge defining London at that magic moment Philip Gilbert Hamilton writing in 1879 in relation to wit whistlers paintings and etchings of the river wrote this and I'm quoting the shores of the Thames in London used to be picturesque and the new embankment will remove much material that is you interesting to artists but the picturesque of the London River is after all nothing but a more entertaining variety of the Universal London ugliness the Thames is beautiful from Maidenhead to Q but not from Battersea to Sheerness if Beauty were the only province of art neither painters nor edges would find anything to occupy them in the foul stream that washes the London warts but even ugliness itself may be valuable if only it has sufficient human interest and fortuitous variety of lines this is the capturing of the real raw thames of the early of the late 19th and early 20th century and here is whistlers assistant William graves painting Hammersmith bridge on Boat Race day and here in a completely different genre a picture painted only one year later by William Holman hunt it's a view of London Bridge on the night of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales these two paintings show that the central sections of the river straightened up Walden and regimented by the Victorians when they had human interest and continual activity still provided an attraction for painters just look at the excitement of graves is painting with a sense of desperation to view the race the spectators terrifyingly watching on the suspension chains up here I mean absolutely mind-boggling health and safety nightmare and beneath here the river just a single boat moving past and similarly um Holman hunt showing the bridge packed with humanity straining to see the royal family the London of Mon a Whistler and Holman hunt was at the very center of the world the richest largest and most powerful city on earth but only fifty years later it was on its knees pummeled and pounded by German bombs and struggling to regain its economic power but the port was still functioning and the Thames was still an economic artery this is a painting by the Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka completed in 1952 I show it to you in particular because he reflects on this painting and his London paintings in his memoirs and this is what he writes and I'll quote it to you during the months spent in London I painted eleven pictures in all mostly views of the Thames my Thames those were still the days when the merchandize of the whole world was shipped up this river London was still a mother city as the ancient Greek cities had been from which the surplus population spread out across the world it was the metropolis of world trade the warehouse of colonies in all five continents where the wind did not blow as it did in Vienna from the Russian steppes but from all points of the compass all at once but within a decade of Kokoschka writing that entry the port of London had gone and the reason for the river was lost nobody now used it for transport for either people or for goods it was really an interruption in London life rather than the sin of it cars and buses saw bridges as obstacles to speedy locomotion and not things of beauty meanwhile the water became an economic asset for developers it became the place where you could build a block of flats and Eadie add several noughts onto the asking price because it looked out a stretch of muddy water the grad the river gradually became walled in by sheets of glass and concrete those are just random photographs of our beloved River Thames today well thank goodness for the Thames festival although increasingly blighted by brutal oversized buildings that wall the river in on both sides I think Londoners today love the Thames more than perhaps at any time since the 18th century the Thames festival the cries for a garden bridge the success of River taxis the millenium bridge that lovely slender bridge the first bridge we built for a century the Thames walkways increasing pedestrian organization along the banks all go some way to compensate for the rape of the Thames banks in the central section which I show you on the screen however though will London and is River in particularly the river remain an attraction to painters and other artists I'm not sure that this bulk of commercial glass and steel flats have really yet succeeded in capturing anyone's imagination and I do slightly fear that the long history of celebrating and recording the river in paint is over or perhaps in abeyance but London and its River have always had a way of bouncing back and I hope that my slightly bleak view of the future is lifted and people will start to record the wonders of the river again in paint and in maybe 10 or 15 years time if I give this lecture again I can show you some really great paintings of the river as it is today thank you very much you [Applause]

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 14,741

Rating: 4.9008265 out of 5

Keywords: gresham college, gresham, lecture, free lecture, gresham lecture, public lecture, free public lecture, free education, edication, college, museum of london, Totally Thames Festival, architecture, built environment, simon thurley, Royal Highway, Sewer, The River Thames, thames, Roman period, 16th century, 17th century, history

Id: vq7TjxTjXi4

Length: 57min 40sec (3460 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 20 2017