London Pride
Peter Quennell
Artists' London David Piper (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £10.95) London in Verse Edited by Christopher Logue (Seeker & Warburg £5.50)
Constable rarely painted townscapes. Hampstead, where he lived for many years, had still the attractions of a village; but 'in London', he told his wife, 'nothing is to be seen, worth seeing, in the natural way ... ' Only distant views of the metropolis excited his imagination. About 1826, for example, he depicted a far-off street fire that lit up the sky behind the dome of St Paul's, and, towards 1832, pro- duced a memorable impression of a stage- coach descending Haverstock Hill on its journey to the City. Again, St Paul's dominates the shadowy horizon; below, St Pancras and Islington form a long dark strip across the picture; while a shaft of sun- shine illuminates the foreground, picking out the scarlet shawl of one of the coach's passengers and the round yellow hat of a young woman who is watching from the roadside.
This delightful work, now in the Paul Mellon collection, but previously, I think, at Saltwood Castle (when the learned
castellan was Lord Clark) glorifies the dust- cover of David Piper's well-written and finely illustrated monograph, a study of the London scene as it has affected artists since the Middle Ages. Mediaeval representa- tions, of course, were symbolic rather than realistic. Then, in the 16th century, the topographers and map-makers arrived, to be followed in the 17th, by two exquisitely painstaking draughtsmen, C.J. Visscher and Wenceslaus Hollar. Visscher's huge panoramic View of London, partly based on John Norden's earlier view, appeared in 1616; Hollar's in 1647. Each was drawn from almost the same position — the southern end of London Bridge. Over the Bridge's battlemented entrance we recognise the traditional frieze of traitors' skulls; the river is crowded with shipping skiffs, pinnaces, barges, merchant vessels — and old St Paul's, stripped of its former spire, bulks elephant-like above the City's roofs.
Both Views, besides their most salient features, contain a multitude of fascinating details — in Hollar's, the dilapidated playhouses on the Bankside, much as they had been known by Shakespeare, and the Bishop of Winchester's town-house (the subject of many Elizabethan jokes, because the Bishop owned a good deal of the adjac- ent brothel-quarter) where groups of his friends or retainers can be seen strolling around his spacious courtyard. Neither Visscher nor Hollar, despite their extraord- inary illustrative gifts, could be called a great artist; but, during the mid-17th cen- tury, Rembrandt himself must, probably have crossed the Channel; at least he is known to have made four drawings of Lon- don, among them a splendid sketch, Lon- don from the Northwest, which David Piper reproduces.
A still more interesting chapter of Artists' London is devoted to the Georgian Age, when, the author writes, 'British-born art- ists at last began to scrutinise, to record and to celebrate their capital city, even though the man whose vision of Lon- don ... has captivated posterity was again a foreign visitor ... ' Hogarth, he points out, did not often 'respond to the visual poetry of townscape'. The vivid glimpses that the great 'pictorial dramatist' allows us of the contemporary urban background — of St James's Street and of old London Bridge, just before its destruction, the dou- ble row of houses that lined it already top- pling into ruin — serve merely as the scenic props of his human tragedies and comedies. It was a Venetian artist, the brilliant Canaletto, who immortalised the solid yet stately appearance of London under George II.
Like Visscher and Hollar, Canaletto was meticulously observant; the only liberties he took were with the erratic English climate. London, during the 18th and early 19th centuries, wore, as Byron noted in Don Juan, 'a huge dun cupola', or 'foolscap crown', of domestic coal-smoke and in- dustrial smog. This Canaletto prudently swept away; the skies he paints are always The Spectator 18 December 1982 clear and sunny; and the hundreds °f diminutive Londoners who people hisOrlin. positions seem not to be walking d°w" Whitehall but perambulating the Piazzetta' The result is a series of luminous bird's-eYe, views, realistic yet romantic — wonderfw examples of what German critics describe Aas. pictures', so labelled becausewtahrledyetre-1111.°Purilll'sy `Wanderlandscha ften' , to plunge into the legendary world the'0 represent, following its paths and knockIiir on its doors. Of Canaletto's English rivals and sit, cessors, Hogarth's friend Samuel Sc°tr whose masterpiece An Arch of Westrninsten Bridge — the bridge was a recent additicin to the London scene, which the Venetia{ artist also painted — occupies two Orsini this book, is undoubtedly the rn°51.„;:e pressive. Although his colour-schemes "-it, less radiant than Canaletto's, his ree°rd' -- some respects, is probably the rrie're ac" curate; for above the bridge, and thro the arch itself, he shows a smoky cloudh
covering the City. lik
As a loyal Londoner, Scott maY haver ed fogs; and it is interesting to rental; that when, during the 1870s, the Freilerh„%id pressionists discovered London, theY1°`"r.ce in fogs and river-mists an unending s°11.ed of inspiration. Monet and Pissarro returrif a again and again to admire the beauti,es Qat London winter. He loved the fog, ivic3-he frequently announced; it was the f°4gi.'ent said, that gave London 'its magruy:),5 amplitude; its regular and massive bw-0, become grandiose in that mysterious 1'1, tle'. At the beginning of the 20th ceinn,./ia. he portrayed both The Houses of Pthmid ment and Waterloo Bridge, Grey DaY;-,,d, in each picture these solid Victorian lim marks have dissolved into fantastic, meW ring wraiths. With suitable references to Wic°1111a r WalterDrummond, Harold Gilman, skiter Kokoschka, C.R.W. NevinsonAlgernon ,., Newton, Victor Pasmore and, of coots John Piper and Graham Sutherlande wish that Raoul Dufy, a trivial sketcilAs had been omitted — David Piper rouiljis off his extremely stimulating snrveY,„• toed choice is judicious; and to such neg'`", artists as Algernon Newton, the elegt.o. lustrator of haunted back-streets and tithe don's dark and solitary canals, he paY5 ' tribute they deserve. an By comparison, London in Verse, it amusingly miscellaneous, pleasantlYi.o. lustrated anthology that includes some ly biographical footnotes, is a rather slilke affair. The editor finds room for ShPolse Milligan but not, alas, for John GaY, w"d of description of the famous Frost Fair an the the apple woman's dreadful end, when frozen surface of the Thames broke LIP id confounds cried, but Death her v° captures so much of ftahleothnwge itth,1e8gtjahcie-o' rod ty
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