As the Thames moves and mingles with London it becomes the most interesting light in the city. At night, with the reflection of the myriad lights above its surface, it comes alive. Then we have that phenomenon of the glitter of the river, that fugitive and mercurial scattering of light that is peculiar to water. The “silver Themmes” can become quicksilver, scattered across its shifting silver surface, and reflected below by streams of easy brightness descending into the ooze. The effect is that of stars, or constellations of stars, in the night sky. For some this is a cold light, a distant light, as cold as the depths of the waters themselves. This light is different in depth and texture from the soft light of the Upper Thames. The glittering is a warning not to come too close.
But, at night, the river can also become a pool of sleeping blackness. Once it has lost its sheen of silver, it becomes ink-dark and viscous. It is silent. It is as still as a river of the dead. In midstream it has a greenish hue, but the rest is purple or black. The shadows of the riverside buildings lend another tone of darkness, and the colour has faded from the city itself so that it is lost in the obscurity of the sky. This was the river, at least, for many centuries. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is never wholly dark as it winds through London. The street-lights, and the lights blazing in innumerable buildings, keep it illuminated. Down by the estuary the vivid flaring lights of the treatment plants and refineries are like giant torches guiding it on its processional way to the sea. Only in the Upper Thames, and on certain stretches of the river by the marshes, is still the perfect pitch of darkness; only there is the water still black and silent.
The sounds of the river are as various as those of the natural and human worlds. It might seem unnaturally quiet in the estuarial region. Where once the river was filled with life and activity, there is now very little business upon the water. It has become in part an empty river, which imparts the illusion of silence. But there is still the flurry of the wake of tankers and of small-engined boats crossing the flat surface like water-beetles. A little upriver, in the neighbourhood of Greenhithe or Tilbury, the noise of the Thames is that of clangour or loud lament, with the sound of cranes and other machinery fighting against the lap of the water and the raucous cries of the seagulls.
In its upper reaches the Thames partakes of that peace which is always associated with quiet or isolated waters. In that way it can be a balm and restorative. Thoreau believed that by looking into water, the “earth’s eye,” “the beholder measures the depths of his own nature.” This is the context for the presumed silence of the river. It is a place for inward contemplation. But it can never wholly be silent. The sounds of the world surround it—the innumerable callings of birds, the wind in the branches overhanging the water, the occasional splash of a fish, all these sounds have accompanied the course of the river for millennia upon millennia before the onset of human time. If we could by an act of sympathetic magic return to that unimaginable epoch, would the sound be the only familiar element?
Once the sun has set, the sounds of the night surround the river; the leap of the fish is then more like a pistol shot than a splash, the leaves fall upon the bank with a definite crack, the wind is louder and the noises of the creeping creatures of the night seem very close.
In the human river, and in those stretches of it moving within London, there is perpetual sound, even if only the waters lapping rhythmically against the side of old wharves and docks. In the river of London, too, there is the noise of the tide running against the banks. In the days of the great docks the noise of commercial activity never stopped, night or day, upon what was principally an industrial waterway. The hymn of the river was then the bumping of bales and the hissing of steam, the riveting and the scraping of keels, the shouting of orders through the night. On the Embankment itself there were the boom of fog signals and the muffled roar of motor-cars mixed with the whistle of the trains and the ringing of the bells of the City churches. These were also the circumambient sounds of the river, as if the Thames itself had become the echo-chamber of the city.
It is sometimes forgotten how noisy the river once was in the centre of the capital. In previous centuries, at night, it would have been heard in most of the streets within the walls. George Borrow, in his novel Lavengro (1851), dwelled upon the cacophony of the Thames:
there was a wild hurly-burly upon the bridge which nearly deafened me. But if upon the bridge there was confusion, below it was a confusion ten times compounded…Truly tremendous was the roar of the descending waters, and the bellow of the tremendous gulfs, which swallowed them for a time, and then cast them forth foaming and frothing from their horrid wombs.
The river had become a “roaring gulf,” like the roar of the city all around it. In the same period Henry Mayhew chose in London Labour and the London Poor to hear the more soothing sounds of the Thames, with the airs of the “four bells” upon the ships mixed with “the tinkling of the distant purl-man’s bell” the “purl-man” was a purveyor of beer who worked upon the river, selling his product to the sailors and labourers. Mayhew also heard “the rattle of some chain let go” and “the chorus of many seamen heaving at the ropes” with “the hoarse voice of someone from the shore bawling through his hands to his mate aboard the craft in the river.” This is the human voice of the river; its waters seem monstrous and “horrid,” but its devotees or inhabitants issue a more sympathetic sound.
The smells of that earlier river, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were legion. Some of them survive still. There was the smell of mud, exposed on the foreshore at low tide, strong and pungent. There was the smell of smoke or, rather, of the smoke-laden vapours that travelled upriver from the Port. It is not an unpleasing smell for those who savour the various products of humankind; it is redolent of energy and labour, somehow mixed with the melancholy pleasure of the bonfire. When people returned to London by way of London Bridge or Westminster Bridge, they were greeted with a familiar smoky aroma. There was the evocative scent of tar, always associated with shipping; it was the smell that Thomas Carlyle noticed when he first moved to Chelsea. By the dockside the odour of tar was mingled with those of hemp and of tow. And then there was always the scent of beer (or, shall we say, of barley and malt and hops) emanating from the huge breweries beside the Thames; the smell still lingers in Wandsworth, and fugitive odours have been gathered on the south bank near Southwark like the spectres of ancient manufacture.
The land of the Thames docks was the land of multitudinous odours. The atmosphere of pungent tobacco was succeeded by the more soporific aroma of rum; in some quarters the air was filled with the stench of hides, or of binfuls of horn, while from other parts emanated the smell of coffee or the savour of nutmeg and cinnamon. There are corners of Cinnamon Wharf, now a complex of apartments, where fugitive phantoms of that smell seem still to linger. The smell of softwood timber came from the Surrey Commercial Docks, while from Shad Thames came the smell of dog biscuits and the odour of Seville oranges. On the North Quay of the Isle of Dogs there was the smell of sugar, and on the South Quay of dates and tea. There was the smell of wine, and its various incarnations of sherry, port and brandy; there was the smell of oakum and of wool.
The upper reaches of the Thames are, in contrast, filled with the perfume of creation. Along the banks of the Upper Thames comes the smell of grass and of meadows, mingled with the peculiar dank richness of the water-meadows. It is an intoxicating mix of moisture and of growth. Here can be sensed the aromatic odour of sweet sedge and the sharper scent of the osier bark.
Does the river itself have its own smell? If it does, then it is an ancient one. Water itself has no smell, but all the associations and affiliations of the Thames have their own particular odour. It is, perhaps, the odour of the old. It smells of mud and weed and forgotten things. It smells of mould and of fungus. It smells of rotting wood. It smells of engine oil. It smells of metal. It is sometimes sharp. But it is also sometimes refreshing. It smells of the wind and the rain. I
t smells of storms. In some places it seems to smell of the sea. It smells of everything. It smells of nothing.
PART XII
The River of Art
Alexander Pope’s villa at Twickenham
CHAPTER 37
Thames Art
The earliest artists came to the river. There is a fifteenth-century engraving of the Thames beside the Tower, with London Bridge in the background; it is in fact one of the earliest engravings of London itself and this image of the turbulent water, with craft of all sizes upon it, is the harbinger of many representations of a river city. There can be no London without the Thames, and the first artists of the capital placed the river at the heart of their design. In 1558 Anthony van der Wyngaerde executed his panorama from the south bank; it showed the city from the Fleet River to London Bridge but, perhaps more significantly, it linked the north and south banks of the river with various lines of harmony. The city is seen to be flowing with the Thames. In his panorama there are boatmen and fishermen, as well as travellers waiting by the stairs at Stargate Horse Ferry. The “Braun and Hogenberg” map of the 1560s shows a representative group of Tudor Londoners looking down upon the Thames; the skiffs and wherries float upon the water in natural formation, while the line of the streets seems once more to reproduce the flow of the river. It was the best way of conveying the riverine nature of the city.
There is a woodcut by Abraham Saurs, dated 1608, which also depicts the river as the dominating presence; a three-masted galleon is sailing upriver towards London Bridge, and so are many smaller vessels. In 1616 Nicholas Visscher completed a view of London from Southwark. He also chose the Thames as the ground of his composition. In fact there is not one representation or panorama of London that does not yield the palm of significance to the Thames. The most famous of those panoramas, executed by Wenceslaus Hollar in the mid-seventeenth century, displays the river as the centre of activity and energy. The Thames itself is a great band of light uniting the composition, lending an air of power and monumentality to the city itself.
In the eighteenth century artists as diverse as Richard Wilson and William Marlow derived their inspiration from the river. Wilson portrayed the Thames at Richmond and at Twickenham, where the poets congregated, but he also completed a view of Westminster Bridge in the process of construction. His work displayed an idealised river, in much the same spirit as the sylvan verse of the period. He may be said to be the principal artist of the “London School,” which might as well be renamed the “Thames School” it included other eighteenth-century painters such as Samuel Scott and Marlow himself. There is a celebrated work by Scott, The Entrance to the Fleet River, which brings all the principles of elegant harmony to what was in reality an incommodious and insalubrious neighbourhood. The wherries and the barges lie in perspective formation, the reflection of their sails in the ruffled water; there are discreet hints of trade, with some bales of wool being transported downriver, but the general atmosphere is one of calm enjoyment. This is the river of Sir Richard Steele, too, who in an essay for the Spectator of 1712 dilated on the pleasures of riverine trade where “the banks on each side are well peopled, and beautified with as agreeable plantations, as any spot on earth; but the Thames itself, loaded with the produce of each shore, added very much to the landscape.”
The work of Marlow and of Scott had in part been influenced by the Venetian master, Canaletto, who brought the light and life of his native city to the river. For much of his residence in London he stayed at the Duke of Richmond’s house in Whitehall, and from that vantage completed many views of the river. He transformed the Thames into a luminous token of elegance and dignity, a force for civilisation comparable to the Tiber and the Seine. Two views painted in the 1740s, 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, have become the emblems of calmness and clarity, magnificence and dignity. His was essentially an aesthetic view that removed the more heinous prospects of mercantile commerce and the business of trade, but it was a fitting adjunct to Pope’s pastoral tribute in Windsor Forest (1713):
No seas so rich, so gay no banks appear,
No lake so gentle, and no spring so clear.
More than any other artist he fixed the image of the Thames in the eighteenth-century imagination. And his influence has not faded yet. One contemporary architect, Theo Crosby, wished to re-create the banks of London in accordance with what he described as “the Canaletto Axis” from the terrace of Somerset House. Canaletto set the seal on the notion of the Thames as a river of civilisation, a graceful and harmonious river not untouched by intimations of grandeur. It was the river tamed by aesthetics.
That vision is evident in the celebration of the “picturesque Thames,” popularised by the publishers of albums and subscription volumes with titles such as “Tours of the Thames” and “Views of the Thames.” There were three very popular collections of river prints in the latter half of the eighteenth century—Boydell’s Collection of Views (1770), Ireland’s Picturesque Views on the River Thames (1792) and Boydell’s History of the Thames (1794–6)—which were largely concerned with the riverine views to the west of London Bridge. This was the area that had been partially reconstructed by Wren and had benefited from the eighteenth-century renovation of London itself.
Samuel Ireland’s Picturesque Views, in which a series of charming drawings is accompanied by an anodyne text of no great literary or historical value, is sufficiently representative. But studies of this nature prompted a new generation of English travellers to explore the river, just as the “Grand Tour” of European sites was going out of fashion. Europe was effectively closed to English travellers in the 1790s, and from 1805 to 1815, and in these periods the delights of the national scene became even more apparent. To see the Thames was to understand an aspect of burgeoning national identity. The vogue in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for paintings of the Thames was the single most important dimension of the relatively new notion of painting from English nature. The Thames might even be said to have been the harbinger of “naturalism” in English art.
William Hogarth could not be accused of lending false enchantment to the Thames. He is more readily associated with the urban rather than the riverine world, but he chose to live in Chiswick by the banks of the Thames and was interred in the churchyard there. He depicted the Cockney river, of ribaldry and punishment. In one of his series of engravings, The Effects of Industry and Idleness (1747), the idle apprentice is shown by a Thames waterman the spectacle of Execution Dock, on the north bank of the Thames at Wapping in the East, where a dead pirate hangs in chains to await the tides. In retaliation the apprentice, Tom Idle, points out the stretch along the Thames known as Cuckold’s Point and formerly Cuckold’s Haven.
It was entirely characteristic of Hogarth’s love of the more rumbustious river of the eighteenth century that, with a party of four friends, he made a river excursion from Billingsgate to Gravesend that seems to have been an extended drinking bout. They went down the river in a tilt-boat, shouting and drinking, exchanging jokes with the watermen and singing indecorous songs at the top of their voices; this can justly be described as a quintessential Thames scene. Thomas Rowlandson is in the same tradition, and his sketches of watermen in particular lend full weight to the reputation of Thames boatmen as coarse and expansive.
The name of Constable is not generally attached to the river, but he completed at least one painting of the Thames, in a view of the river upon the opening of Waterloo Bridge in 1817. The pre-eminent artist of the river remains J. M.W. Turner, who devoted much of his voluminous work to depictions of the Thames in all its manifold appearances from the calm serenity of the upper river to the dangers of the estuarial waters. There is hardly a part of the river that he did not paint—Folly Bridge, the London Pool, Nuneham Courtenay, Lambeth, Abingdon, Staines, Windsor, Wallingford. The whole world of the river came within his purview. He painted from
boats and, while living at Ferry House in Isleworth, he built his own skiff for his Thames excursions. To re-employ a phrase of John Ruskin, he understood its language. It was the language of his painterly career.
Turner lived by the Thames all his life; he was born in 1775, in Maiden Lane, just off the Strand, from where a short stroll took him to the riverside. In Modern Painters (1843–60) Ruskin described his youth among “black barges, patched sails and every possible condition of fog…Forests of masts, ships with the sun on their sails, red-faced sailors with pipes appearing over the gunwales.” From his earliest days Turner understood the human life and labour associated with the river. That is why in his depiction of the workers of the Thames, and of the farm labourers upon its banks, there is a deep consonance between the human figures and the riverscape. Even in his earliest studies he was intent upon describing what might be called the heterogeneous or egalitarian temper of the river; he noted the contrasts between the mansions and the waterworks, the yachts and the coal barges, the “silver” Thames and the grime.
He died by the river, in a bankside residence at Chelsea, and in the years between he moved between Brentford and Isleworth, Twickenham and Chiswick. His earliest biographer, Thornbury, noted that “on the banks of the Thames Turner began his art, on the banks of the Thames he lay down to die.” He did literally begin his art by the river. His earliest exhibited picture, shown at the Royal Academy in 1790, was of a View of the Archbishop’s Palace, Lambeth. In the last days of his life he was accustomed to sit upon the flat roof of his house in Chelsea, and watch the river in dawn light and in twilight. Towards the east was what he called “the Dutch view” and towards the west, upriver, “the English view.”
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