Charles‐François Daubigny 1817–1878
NG 2876 
St Paul’s from the Surrey Side

Sarah Herring, 2019

Extracted from:
Sarah Herring, The Nineteenth Century French Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2019).

c. 1870–3

Oil on canvas, 44.5 × 81 cm

Signed and dated bottom left in dark blue: Daubigny 1873

Support

The canvas is lined. The following numbers and markings appear on the back: ‘3962’ in black crayon, ‘21.442’ on a label, ‘358’ stencilled, ‘2153’ in crayon and two sets of incised interlocked broken circles, one on the canvas and another on the top stretcher bar. This is the mark of a former owner, Alexander Young.¹

Materials and Technique

The canvas is primed with a pale cream ground, which is confined to the picture plane and does not extend on to the tacking edges. It is likely that the artist applied the ground himself, as was his preference.² This ground is composed of lead white extended with barium sulphate and tinted with a little brown and yellow earth to create a warmer cream tone. The greyish‐cream sky was painted using mixtures of lead white with yellow earth, brown umber, viridian, ivory black, vermilion and French ultramarine. Cobalt blue was added to the stronger blue touches. Daubigny’s preference for ivory black is evident in this painting; it is used in many of his pigment mixtures and for the black outlines of the barges in the foreground. Viridian has also been employed in various colour mixtures, including the sky and the brown paint of the warehouse on the far right side of the painting, where it is combined with vermilion, earth pigments and again ivory black. The thin, dark blue‐green shadows between the posts in the right‐hand corner are made up of a mixture of emerald green and brown earth. The bright orange sack carried by the man in the distance was applied with a stroke of pure cadmium yellow/orange, providing a colourful accent in the dark foreground. The cadmiums were extremely expensive pigments available to artists from the 1840s onwards and have been found only in small quantities on Daubigny’s paintings in the National Gallery collection.

Medium analysis of the paint identified heat‐bodied linseed oil as the binder in a cream‐coloured impasto highlight from the right‐hand side of the composition, underneath the bridge. A little pine resin was also present.³

In general the brushwork throughout is very free and broad, with long single strokes in grey and black defining the boats in the foreground. Many areas of the painting have the appearance of having been painted wet‐in‐wet, suggesting that the artist painted more than one layer in the first sitting. A paint sample from the warehouse on the extreme right‐hand side, viewed in cross‐section, shows several paint layers: first an unevenly applied grey‐brown underlayer above the ground, which contains lead white, earth pigments, viridian and ivory black; then a second, off‐white underlayer containing lead white with yellow and brown earth pigments; and then a final thin brown layer, described above.

The sky appears to have been executed in two distinct stages, with a significant time lapse in between. The first campaign consists of a lighter layer, still largely visible, which can be seen to have developed a fine but widespread vertical craquelure pattern. The second campaign consists of broader and darker brushwork, some of it quite haphazardly applied. The pale sky paint is brought around and over the contours of the boats and buildings. A thick whitish paint overlaps the edges of the buildings on the far right (fig. 1) and a touch of dirty pink obscures the top of one of the foreground posts. While Daubigny painted and drew a number of sketches during his visit to London, which he used for studio compositions when back in Paris, the most likely sequence of events in this instance is that he began painting the scene in London in 1870 or 1871 and finished it back in France.⁴ The cracks referred to above are of the type that might typically be associated with rolling of the canvas support, which in all likelihood took place when the painting was transported back to France from England. And after reworking such areas as the sky, the artist added his signature and that year’s date of 1873. This reworking and/or finishing off was almost certainly done in response to a commission from Hector Brame for a view of St Paul’s in 1872 (for which see under Provenance). Both the signature and date are applied in a dark blue colour, which appears black in the signature itself, where it is thickest.

Conservation and Condition

The canvas has been lined. The general appearance of wearing and overpainting seems to be due to original technique, and cracks run through all areas, some of which have been retouched. Small damages in the lower layer of paint along the top edge, possibly sustained during the transportation of the picture from England to France, could have been repainted by Daubigny himself. The varnish appears to be substantially yellowed.

Discussion

In the foreground a row of barges is tethered in front of some warehouses.⁵ Three men clamber among them, one with a load of coal on his back. With one wearing a white shirt streaked with yellow and the other carrying a bright orange sack, they act as bright accents in the gloom. A further accent is provided by the bright red smoke‐belching chimney of the boat close to the foreground. The vantage point is between Waterloo Bridge and Blackfriars Bridge on the south side of the river Thames, looking north from the former towards the latter and St Paul’s Cathedral. Blackfriars Bridge was a new construction, completed in 1869 on the site of the earlier bridge built in 1769. Behind it is the Blackfriars Railway Bridge, built in 1864 for the London, Chatham and Dover Railway. A train is passing over it, invisible but for its plume of smoke. In the background St Paul’s, delicately picked out in pinks and greens, sits prominently left of centre. To the left a further church spire behind waterfront warehouses is almost certainly St Martin, Ludgate, and at the far left can be seen the gas holders of the City of London Gasworks, which were removed at the end of the 1870s and depicted with great clarity in John O’Connor’s view of 1874, The Embankment (fig. 2).⁶ The tall smoking chimney to the right of the gas holders may possibly be associated with the City Flour Mills, which were constructed by James Ponsford in 1850, badly damaged by fire in 1872 and subsequently rebuilt. This mill actually stood on the waterfront, just to the east of Blackfriars Bridge and to the west and south of St Paul’s, but Daubigny has placed it to the west of the bridge. However, an engraving of 1864 showing the construction of the Victoria Embankment also shows a further chimney standing next to the gas holders, which perhaps could be the chimney in NG 2876.⁷ It should be emphasised that in his view Daubigny does not give any real sense of the numerous wharves and warehouses directly in front of St Paul’s, choosing instead to depict such buildings to the west side of the bridge, thereby pushing the gas holders further west, when in fact they were situated much closer to the bridge itself.⁸

The river traffic includes a paddle steamer on the far left. Paddle streamers steamers had been a feature of the river since the 1820s, and by the 1850s and 1860s a large number of separate companies were operating. Steamers belonging to different companies were identifiable by their differently coloured or patterned funnels, and the black funnel with white band of the steamer depicted here could possibly identify it as belonging to the Westminster Steamboat Company, which operated between Old Swan Pier next to Cannon Street and a landing stage at Westminster Bridge, conveying passengers between Waterloo and the City.⁹

Daubigny painted NG 2876 on his third and final visit to London. He first visited the city for a week in July 1865 with Alfred Cadart, when they were looked after by Frederic Lord Leighton, an admirer of Daubigny.¹⁰ Both were also invited to [page 293] [page 294] lunch by Whistler.¹¹ Daubigny was also in London in 1866, the year in which he sent Moonrise to the Royal Academy (exhibition no. 150). The painting was apparently so badly hung, at the top in the east room, that his friends felt that a protest should be made; but the poor hanging was in some way mitigated by its purchase by the artist Henry Tanworth Wells (1828–1903).¹²

Daubigny’s third visit to the capital, from October 1870 to May 1871, was as a refugee from the Franco‐Prussian war. He briefly lived in Lisle Street, Leicester Square, but by November 1870 had moved to 13 Conning Place, Kensington.¹³ Fellow artists Pissarro and Monet were also staying in London to escape the war, Pissarro in Upper Norwood and Monet near Daubigny in what is now Kensington High Street. Meeting with Monet in November 1870 (according to one version on the banks of the Thames where Monet had set up his easel), Daubigny subsequently introduced him to the gallery owner Paul Durand‐Ruel, who was also taking refuge in London.¹⁴ On this third visit Daubigny was on the Committee that organised the Exhibition for the Benefit of the Distressed Peasantry of France, at the Gallery of the Society of British Artists, which opened on 17 December 1870 .

This painting is unusual not only among the pictures painted by Daubigny during his three London visits, but also among his river landscapes painted in France. His numerous views of French rivers, particularly the Oise and Seine, continued to stress their rural nature without the passenger steamboats, despite the fact that they were by now a common sight.¹⁵ During his visits to London Daubigny also tended to paint more rural views of the Thames downstream at Erith in Kent. The Thames at Erith of 1866 (fig. 3) shares a similar composition to NG 2876, but the view is across a wide‐open expanse of the river.¹⁶ This is not to say that he ignored the new passenger boats. In a further painting of 1866, Boats on the Thames (private collection), the most dominant boat is a sailing ship seen head‐on, but in the background a paddle steamer is distinguishable by its column of smoke curling up into the sky.¹⁷

Daubigny painted one further river view of the city of London, The Thames at London (fig. 4). The view appears also to be from the south bank, further down stream, looking back at what may be Cannon Street Railway Bridge, which opened in 1866, with St Paul’s in the distance. The prominent tower is possibly the Monument, moved somewhat to the left.¹⁸

The smog made a great impression on the artist from the moment of his arrival in the city, and in October 1870 he stopped writing a letter to light a candle, saying: ‘It’s eleven o’clock in the morning. So much for the climate. Fog! Visibility less than two paces.’¹⁹ In NG 2876 he has also conveyed the dirty, foggy atmosphere of the city. All the buildings are shrouded in fog. The sky is leaden and heavily painted in creams, beiges, greys and dirty pinks. Smoke comes from the train, the chimney on the left and the boats on the river, and appears to mingle with the clouds. But compared with [page 295] the middle ground and background, the foreground barges are painted with a comparative clarity and defined strongly with blacks and greys.

Aside from his difficulties with the weather, Daubigny was not impressed by British painting. On 2 November 1870 he wrote to an anonymous recipient of his horror: What terrible painting modern English painting is! They would have real need of our influence. Next to them, Gérome and Bougereau have the airs of realists. How would Courbet, Millet, Ribot and Bonvin look! I think that Durand‐Ruel has much to do in order to change their taste. If they paint fruit or flowers, they have the appearance of being of glass and sugar. The landscapes are made out of caterpillars, or have the air of being executed out of hair. The figures look like cardboard cut‐outs. They have, however, their museums and their very worthy old masters.²⁰

Provenance

NG 2876 was commissioned by the dealer Hector Brame (1831–1899) in 1872 for 2,500 francs, as is recorded in Daubigny’s second account book, ‘Livre de comptabilité illustré 1871–3’: ‘Comte de Brame. Tableaux commandés par Mr Brame’ as ‘Saint‐Paul sur la Tamise 2500 payé’ (fig. 5);²¹ Brame’s sale, 29 January 1874, lot 22, bought Brame (either the painting was bought in or it was purchased by his son, Hector‐Gustave [1866–1936], who succeeded him);²² with Buck and Reid Gallery, 179 Bond Street, London, in autumn 1887, where it was exhibited;²³ in the collection of Alexander Young (1828–1907) by 1896;²⁴ acquired with the Young Collection by Agnew’s in 1906; Young sale, Christie’s, 4 July 1910, lot 294, bought Obach for £630; presented to the National Gallery ‘in the name of Mr John Charles Joseph Drucker as a mark of respect from a few of his friends’, 1912. Drucker (1862–1944) was a Dutch collector who, with his wife, donated a collection of Dutch nineteenth‐century art to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. He also gave in 1910 a number of pictures to the National Gallery, including paintings by Israëls, Bosboom and the Maris brothers. The gift was discussed at the Board Meeting of 11 June 1912, where a letter of 8 June from the art collector Thomas J. Barratt (1841–1914) was read, offering on behalf of a few friends to present the painting. In a further letter of 11 June Barratt proposes the inscription and states that he has instructed Colnaghi to send the picture to the Gallery;²⁵ As Colnaghi had joined forces with Obach from 1911 to become Colnaghi and Obach, it is likely that the painting had remained with Obach since its purchase in 1910; for a time NG 2876 was at the Tate Gallery, from where it was transferred in 1956.

Exhibitions

London 1874 (41, St Paul’s, from the Surrey Side); exhibited at Buck and Reid in 1887, probably as part of A Collection of Pictures by A Collection of Pictures by Corot, Rousseau, Daubigny, M. Maris, J. Maris and Others ;²⁶ London 1896 (59); London 1908a (perhaps 9, View of St Paul’s from the River); London 1930 (68); London 1950 (19); London 1957 (59); London 1977 (80); Portsmouth, Nottingham, Stoke‐on‐Trent, Barnard Castle and London 1980 (16); London 1987 (162); Truro, Bedford and Stoke‐on‐Trent 2003–4 (not numbered); St Petersburg, New York and Baltimore 2005–6 (6); London 2009 (40 in accompanying book); Paris, London and Philadelphia 2014–15 (10, London); Cincinnati, Edinburgh and Amsterdam 2016–17 (fig. 45 in accompanying checklist); London and Paris 2017–18, p. 65. On long‐term loan to the Government Art Collection, 10 Downing Street, London, from August 1964 to April 1977 .

Literature

Davies and Gould 1970, pp. 43–4; Hellebranth 1976, p. 249, no. 756; House, ‘London in the Art of Monet and Pissarro’, in Warner 1987, p. 77; White, Pilc and Kirby 1998, p. 92; Roy 1999, p. 339; Beaufort 2002, p. 73; House, ‘Visions of the Thames’, in House, Chu and Hardin 2005, pp. 15–37, no. 27; Chu, ‘The Lu(c)re of London: French Artists and Art dealers in the British Capital, 1859–1914’, in ibid. , pp. 39–54, no. 43.

Notes