Charles-François Daubigny, 'St Paul's from the Surrey Side', about 1870-3

The shadowy dome of St Paul’s Cathedral is viewed from the south bank of the Thames. In the immediate foreground is a row of tethered barges; the river beyond is dotted with boats, including a passenger paddle steamer which belches out smoke. Just to the front of the cathedral the newly built Blackfriars Bridge (completed in 1869) straddles the river; behind it a train, invisible but for its plume of smoke, passes over Blackfriars Railway Bridge. At the far left are the gas holders of the City of London Gasworks, which were removed at the end of the 1870s. Apart from the foreground barges, everything is shrouded in the smog for which London was famous in the nineteenth century. The sky is leaden and heavily painted in creams, beiges, greys and dirty pinks. Smoke coming from the train, the chimney on the left and the boats on the river appears to mingle with the clouds.

Daubigny painted this view on his third, final and longest visit to London. He had previously visited the city for a week in July 1865, and also in 1866. He arrived in October 1870, a refugee from the Franco-Prussian War, and stayed until May 1871. Fellow artists Pissarro and Monet were also sheltering in the city and, according to one version of a famous story, Daubigny came across Monet working on the banks of the Thames. He was perhaps painting his view of the Houses of Parliament.

This unrelentingly urban view is unusual in Daubigny’s work. During his first two visits to London he painted the more rural reaches of the Thames out at Erith in Kent. His numerous views of rivers in France, particularly the Oise and the Seine, are also first and foremost landscapes, in which he stressed their rural nature and ignored the increasingly common sight of paddle steamers. It was perhaps the foggy atmosphere of London that influenced his choice of subject here. The smog made a great impression on him during this visit. In October 1870, when he had just arrived, he had to stop writing a letter at eleven o’clock in the morning to light a candle: ‘So much for the climate. Fog! Visibility less than two paces’.

The painting is dated 1873, after Daubigny’s return to France. It is likely that he started the work in London in 1870 or 1871, and finished it back in France, at which point he signed and dated it. While many areas of the painting have been painted wet-in-wet the sky appears to have been completed in two distinct stages.