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Billingsgate

Whistler's Thames Etchings: Billingsgate

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 Black Lion Wharf.

James McNeill Whistler Billingsgate 1859
Etching on paper. Lent by the SP Avery Collection, Miriam and Ira D Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

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