London: The Biography

Of course Canaletto is the master of these riverscapes in which he creates a city aspiring towards magnificence. Two companion portraits, in particular, The Thames from the terrace of Somerset House, Westminster in the distance and The Thames from the terrace of Somerset House, the city in the distance, take the measure of London as essentially a noble European city. It seems likely that Canaletto came to London in the 1740s specifically to paint the recently constructed Westminster Bridge and to give an aesthetic imprimatur to the city’s latest public building, but his is an idealised city and an idealised river. The sky is free of fog and soot, so that the buildings shine with expressive clarity; the river itself is luminous, its surface iridescent, while the activity upon it is so calm and bright that it is no longer a picture of commerce but of contentment.

A more direct and intimate depiction of the eighteenth-century Thames is found in what is generally classified as the British School, but might as well be termed the London School. William Marlow’s Fresh Wharf, London Bridge and The London Riverfront between Westminster and the Adelphi, for example, acquire much of their strength from their detail. The view of Fresh Wharf shows the work of the wharf with its wooden barrels and olive jars and bales of merchandise being inspected or unloaded; scaffolding and fencing on the north side of London Bridge are an indication that the shops and houses which were once located there have been only just removed. The painting of the London riverfront also acquires its power from its specificity. Here can be seen Buckingham Street and Adam Street, together with the tower and chimneys of the York Buildings Waterworks Company. In the foreground are displayed all the multifarious activities of a messy and grubby river. A coal barge is being unloaded by men in dirty smocks while a woman, surrounded by a pile of baskets, is being ferried towards the shore.

It was in just such a place, and among just such activity, that the youthful imagination of Turner, born in 1775 in Maiden Lane, first moved towards the Thames. In Modern Painters (1843) John Ruskin describes the painter’s early life as involved intimately with “the working of city-commerce, from endless warehouses, towering over Thames, to the back shop in the lane, with its stale herrings.” Here he ventured into the world of barges and ships, “that mysterious forest below London Bridge-better for the boy than wood or pine or grove of myrtle.” Turner was, in other words, a child who derived his inspiration from the city and its river rather than from more conventional and pastoral settings. “How he must have tormented the watermen,” Ruskin goes on to suggest, “beseeching them to let him crouch anywhere in their bows, quiet as a log, so that only he might get floated down there among the ships, and by the ships, and under the ships, staring and clambering;-these the only quite beautiful things in the world.” The great world itself was for Turner contained within the city and its river.

The Thames flowed through him, giving him light and movement. As a child he walked down from his birthplace in Maiden Lane and crossed the Strand to wander among the myriad small streets which led to the river; as an old man he died looking over the Thames in Cheyne Walk. For most of the intervening years he lived “on or within easy reach of its banks.” So we must consider Turner, more than Canaletto or Whistler, as the true child of the river-or, rather, one through whom the spirit of the river emerged most clearly and abundantly. On certain occasions he clothed it with classical beauty, invoking the gods and nymphs which once haunted its banks, while in other paintings he depicted all the immediate and instinctive life of its waters. One of his early sketches was of Old Blackfriars Bridge where he emphasised the tide of the river by painting the piers of the bridge as if they were still dark and wet. An early watercolour of Old London Bridge exhibited the same intense and absorbed observation: here the water wheel of the London Waterworks Company is the central focus, with the force of the water rushing upstream at precisely twenty-five to eleven according to the clock of St. Magnus the Martyr just beyond the bridge.