by Lucy Inglis
The art group was organized by William Hogarth, who set up a life-drawing class in Peter’s Court, just off the lane. Hogarth’s sign was Anthony van Dyck’s head: from ‘a mass of cork made up of several thicknesses compacted together, [he] carved a bust of Vandyck, which he gilt, and placed over his door’. It harked back to a golden age of British ‘courtly’ art, when van Dyck was court painter to Charles I, the greatest royal patron.
The following year, a young Yorkshireman rented three houses in St Martin’s Lane. The move was a departure from everything he knew, a monumental risk for a man of thirty-six with a rapidly expanding family. The young man was Thomas Chippendale.
His St Martin’s Lane premises were not so much a workshop as an expression of his desire to change the way the English occupied their drawing rooms. In 1753, Hogarth published his ideas on art in An Analysis of Beauty. In 1754, Chippendale published his Gentleman and Cabinet Maker’s Director and changed the way English furniture was bought and made.
What Chippendale did was not particularly new; others, such as Batty Langley, had been producing books of designs for gardens and buildings since the early eighteenth century. What Chippendale did was to imagine a harmonious interior, much in the way that Hogarth thought about the composition of a picture. His designs were fashionable, and available. Soon, he had a large group of men and apprentices working from what became 61 St Martin’s Lane while he and his wife lived next door.
Chippendale changed the way his contemporaries thought about design and furniture, and he continues to define a style and type. He did not sign his furniture, so only pieces accompanied by an invoice from Thomas Chippendale can be connected to him. Chippendale’s success was to do with the coherent, distinctive themes of his manual. Anyone with reasonable skill could buy the book and create ‘Chippendale’ furniture in the latest fashion, in whatever wood was available. Examples are seen in oak, elm, walnut and mahogany. The Director was so successful that there is nothing to tell between pieces made by Chippendale and his more talented imitators.
‘THE ART OF DISSECTING’: THE GREAT WINDMILL STREET ANATOMY SCHOOL
The artistic environment in Soho was pervasive. In 1746, William Hunter the anatomist arrived in Paul de Lamerie’s Windmill Street and set up his Anatomy School so that ‘Gentlemen may have an opportunity of learning the Art of Dissecting during the whole winter season, in the same manners as at Paris’.
Hunter was already making large strides into the science of obstetrics. This included making casts of women and their reproductive organs when they had died in various stages of pregnancy. These casts in plaster were then painted to resemble the living form and used for teaching purposes.
Knowledge of the human body was essential for artists, and had been a vital part of artistic education since Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. In the early 1750s, the artists of the St Martin’s Lane Academy engaged William Hunter to help them develop their understanding of the human body, how it worked and moved. This combination created one of the most important artistic experiments in the eighteenth century.
‘Écorché’ means flayed, and by removing the skin and fat of a corpse William Hunter was able to explain the underlying musculature to his pupils, who by now had their own corpse to practise upon. Realizing this musculature would be equally valuable to art students, Hunter set about creating a series of écorché casts. The first, a man with his right arm raised and his left slightly out from his body, was chosen by Hunter and the St Martin’s Lane group from criminals executed at Tyburn. The body of a murderer was chosen because of the beauty of his physique. He was transported to St Martin’s Lane before rigor mortis had set in, then Hunter and the artists placed him into ‘an attitude’. When ‘he became stif we all set to work and by the next morning we had the external muscles all well exposed ready for making a mold from him’.
The resulting écorché figure is now part of the collection of the Royal Academy, who appreciate life models who can keep very still. In his opening address as President of the Royal Academy on 2 January 1769, Joshua Reynolds posited his theory that life drawing was essential to the skills of an artist, stating: ‘He who endeavours to copy nicely the figure before him, not only acquires a habit of exactness and precision, but is continually advancing in his knowledge of the human figure.’ In the same year, William Hunter was appointed Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy. In the late 1760s, as Hunter became more closely allied to the artists who would become the Royal Academicians, he associated art with medicine ever more closely, resulting in the work for which he is still remembered: The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus Exhibited in Figures (published in 1774). This beautifully illustrated book, with its engravings by Jan van Rymsdyk, did much to advance the understanding of the mechanics of pregnancy.
In 1775, the most famous of the Royal Academy’s écorché figures arrived. William Hunter arranged with the sculptor Augustino Carlini that they would obtain a corpse from Tyburn. The identity of the dead man remains controversial, as Hunter chose the best physical specimen on the day. It could be one of two men: Thomas Henman or Benjamin Harley. The body was taken back to Windmill Street and flayed, which took most of the night. When the work was done, he was placed in the position of the Dying Gaul, allowing the head to fall forwards on its broken neck. The original bronze used in the Royal Academy rooms has now been lost but another cast survives in the Edinburgh College of Art. He became known as ‘Smugglerius’, supposedly after the crime for which he was executed.
‘The Dying Gaul, or Smugglerius’, the flayed body of a Tyburn corpse, drawing by William Linnell, 1840
In 1801, Richard Cosway, by then President of the Royal Academy, was keen to do another anatomical figure, that of Christ Crucified. The body of murderer James Legg was taken back to Windmill Street and flayed whilst still malleable. He was crucified, and they watched as he ‘fell into the position a dead body must naturally fall into’. He was then cast.
The Royal Academy also used skeletons and life models, and these became increasingly important as public taste turned against using the écorché criminals. ‘These kind of figures,’ a critic stated, in 1785, ‘do very well for the Academy in private, but they are by no means calculated for the Academy in public.’ Increasingly, models were chosen from the streets, often being men of extraordinary natural musculature or cases where the body had become superannuated through physical labour, such as coal-heaving.
One life model, Wilson, arrived in London in the summer of 1810. He was ‘a black, a native of Boston, a perfect antique figure alive’. On the journey, or soon after disembarking from the ship, he was injured and visited Dr Anthony Carlisle. Carlisle was one of William Hunter’s successors as Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy. He immediately saw his patient’s potential, and hauled him into life classes. Thomas Lawrence was particularly impressed, and declared Wilson ‘the finest figure … [he had] ever seen, combining the character & perfection of many of the Antique statues’.
Benjamin Robert Haydon, Wilson’s regular employer, soon took him on for extended periods of time to make the detailed sketches which would inform an entire career. Haydon’s admiration bordered on the fervent. Years later, he would wistfully remember how, ‘pushed to enthusiasm by the beauty of this man’s form, I cast him, drew him and painted him till I had mastered every part.’ He cast Wilson’s whole body, up to his neck in seven bushels of plaster, but noted: ‘In moulding from nature great care is required … by the time you come to his chest he labours to breathe greatly.’ Wilson passed out inside the casing of hot plaster, and Haydon and his workmen broke him out ‘almost gone’. At first, they were busy attending to Wilson, who ‘lay on the ground senseless and streaming with perspiration’, but when he began to recover Haydon looked at the mould of Wilson’s buttocks ‘which had not been injured’. He described them as ‘the most beautiful sight on earth’ before remarking, ‘the Negro, it may be said, was very nearly killed in the process, but in a day or two recovered.’
Indeed, Wilson came back to Haydon after ‘having been up all night, quite tipsy’ and wanted to make another cast.
Wilson’s fleeting cameo in London is too short, and much of what it reveals does not reflect favourably upon the attitudes of artists or critics; he was at once beautiful, yet parts of his face and body corresponded to ‘the animal’. In every modern sense, Wilson was an American man who came to London and made a small fortune in a short time. For him, London’s streets really were paved with gold. The image his body created – that of the noble savage – would endure to become an icon for abolitionists. For most of the nineteenth century, his body-type dominated the image of the black male in British and American art. The details of Wilson’s life may be sparse, but we are left with the image of an ‘extraordinary fine figure’.
THE ‘PORRIDGE ISLAND’ OF CHARING CROSS
Samuel Johnson once said the ‘full tide of human existence is at Charing Cross’. Here were the large coaching inns, including the famous Golden Cross, sending and receiving travellers from the West. Some idea of the size and concomitant racket is given by the fact that the ground floor of the Golden Cross held stabling for seventy-eight horses, as well as a bar and tap room for the coachmen, a farrier’s shed and a booking office. The entrance to the old inn was too low for the modern coaches, proving fatal at least once. In 1800, the coach leaving for Chatham bore, ‘a young woman, sitting on the top, (she) threw her head back, to prevent her striking against the beam; but there being so much luggage on the roof of the coach as to hinder her laying herself sufficiently back, it caught her face, and tore the flesh’. She died soon afterwards. The Golden Cross sat roughly where South Africa House is now, on the east side of Trafalgar Square. Travellers arriving here and at other coaching inns, such as the Greyhound, then took local lodgings. The wealthier ones lodged close to the court, in St James’s and Pall Mall; the less well off disappeared into Soho, or south of the Strand for the cheapest accommodation.
Where Charing Cross Station is today sat Northumberland House, a massive early-seventeenth-century house, commemorated by Northumberland Avenue leading down to the Embankment. Facing down Whitehall were the statue of Charles I and the pillory. On the north side of what is now Trafalgar Square, where the National Gallery now stands, was the Royal Mews, providing stabling for the King’s horses. The quality of housing available was fairly low and much of it was old and shabby, so socially the area was very mixed. The area south of Charing Cross was full of grand but rotting buildings, street and river traffic, and more of the Huguenot French immigrants.
One of the larger properties between the Thames and the Strand was Durham House, now commemorated in Durham House Yard. In 1632, Sir Edward Hungerford was born in Wiltshire. He inherited a fortune and, with it, Durham House. Heavy debts sustained at the gambling tables left him unable to repair the mansion, and it fell into disrepair. However, the house had one huge advantage: the Hungerford Stairs, leading up from the Thames. It was a convenient place for traders to land their commodities to sell at the nearby Covent Garden market, to the north.
Small street markets were everywhere, but it soon became apparent that the densely populated area of Charing Cross and the Strand needed its own market. Edward Hungerford applied to the King for permission to establish a market on the site of Hungerford House. It opened in 1682, a thriving shopping-mall-type affair with a covered piazza. Unlike most London markets, Hungerford had no particular speciality. It sold fish, meat and all types of fruit and vegetables. After 1685, the area became very popular with the Huguenots, and the market was known for selling foreign foods.
There was a large meeting hall upstairs which, in 1688, the refugees established as Hungerford Market Church. It remained a church until 1754, when the market itself was already in decline. However, demand for a market in the area remained high, and so many people came and went via Hungerford Stairs that it limped on for another century, when Peter Cunningham, in his Handbook of London, declared that it failed because it was ‘of too general a character and attempts too much in trying to unite Leadenhall, Billingsgate, and Covent-garden Markets’. Despite attempts to revive it, Hungerford Market failed and was eventually pulled down to make way for the development of Charing Cross Station, completed in 1864.
Very close to the Hungerford Market was the dwelling Benjamin Franklin occupied for sixteen years whilst working in the London print trade. He was fond of London, although he thought that his colleagues drank too much beer. He taught two of his colleagues to swim, and once swam from Chelsea to Blackfriars as a demonstration. On his first visit to London as a young man, he made a pass at his best friend’s girlfriend, a ‘genteelly bred … sensible, lively’ milliner with her own shop. She repulsed him, and he noted the incident in his autobiography as ‘another erratum’. The Benjamin Franklin House survives as a museum at 36 Craven Street.
By the 1740s, the problem with Strand streetwalkers had become so pronounced that one night the constables of the watch, having drunk too much on duty, rounded up twenty-five women and stuck them into the St Martin’s Lane Watch House. Six of them suffocated to death overnight, including a laundress who had been caught up in the fray on her way home from work. St Martin’s and the surrounding area continued to be a rough area, largely dependent upon prostitution. In one court there ‘were 13 houses … all in a state of great dilapidation, in every room in every house excepting one only lives one or more common prostitutes of the most wretched description - such as now cannot be seen in any place’.
The walls of Scotland Yard, then filled with old wooden buildings, were
… covered with ballads and pictures … miserable daubs but subjects of the grossest nature. At night there were a set of prostitutes along this wall, so horridly ragged, dirty and disgusting that I doubt much there are now any such in any part of London. These miserable wretches used to take any customer who would pay them twopence, behind the wall.
Scotland Yard served as the way in and out of 4 Whitehall Place, which was the police headquarters after the formation of the force, in 1829. By the late Victorian period, the headquarters had spread into almost all the buildings surrounding the yard and so, in 1890, when they moved to Victoria, the new building was named New Scotland Yard.
Near the original Scotland Yard, Charles Dickens worked as a boy in Warren’s Blacking Factory on the Hungerford Stairs and describes the factory as a
… crazy, tumbledown old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscotted rooms and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise visibly up before me, as if I were there again.
By the time Dickens was working at Warren’s, the Charing Cross district was an eyesore in the heart of fashionable London. Lord Berkeley still kept his staghounds in kennels there. The Royal Mews, where the National Gallery now stands, stabled the King’s horses. Apart from the grand church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, the buildings and their tenants were poor, including small pockets such as ‘the Bermudas’, ‘the Caribbee Islands’ and, notably, ‘Porridge Island’ which Hester Thrale described as a ‘mean street, filled with cookshops for the convenience of the poorer inhabitants; the real name of it I know not’.
The makeshift nature of the area before the Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross developments is further encapsulated in the mystery of Bow Wow Pie.
Immediately in front of the Horse Guards, were a range of apple stalls, and at twelve noon every day two very large stalls were set up for the sale of ‘Bow Wow pie’. This pie was made of meat very highly seasoned. It had a thick crust around the inside and over the very large deep brown pans which held it. A small plate of this pie was sold for three-halfpence, and was usually eaten on the spot, by what sort of people and amidst what sort of language they who have known what low life is may comprehend, but of which they who do not must remain ignora
nt.
Quite what the highly seasoned meat in Bow Wow Pie was, is sadly – or perhaps thankfully – lost to us now.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the area had become hopelessly run-down. The Prince Regent desired something better, along the continental model. John Nash set about devising a recklessly imprudent plan. He imagined a straight Regent Street, smashing through the existing, blurred borders of Mayfair and Soho and designed to ‘cross the eastern entrance to all the streets occupied by the higher classes and leave out the bad streets’. It would create a continental-style boulevard in the heart of the West End, leading from Carlton House up northwards to Regent’s Park, giving the rich of St James’s, Mayfair and the newly emerging Marylebone somewhere pleasant to stroll, sup and be seen.
The reality was a compromised street which was built piecemeal. It is most successful at its northern end. The clearance of Charing Cross began in 1820, but the Trafalgar Square development was to stall for years. The National Gallery, finished in 1838, is the square’s finest feature, yet even that is a compromise, built on the plot of the old Royal Stables and recycling some of the columns and decorative features from the demolished Carlton House. Trafalgar Square is a London landmark, but it is a stagnant place, robbed of its diversity and vivacity by a bad attempt at a Parisian street. Caught between a spendthrift prince and an architect of overweening ambition, one of the liveliest, if roughest, parts of London was cleared and left derelict. With the arrival of Charing Cross Station, one of the last remnants of old London was railroaded out of existence. Although Nash’s Regent Street development was ultimately compromised, his idea of corralling the ‘bad streets’ of Soho was successful, securing the area’s decline in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.