Thames

by Peter Ackroyd

  He loved the river but, more importantly, he needed the river. It was an instrument of his vision and source of his inspiration. Turner was entranced by moving water, and by the reflections in water; he fixed for ever in his canvases the various lights that seem to emanate from the regions of the Thames. The luminous quality of his painting has often been remarked, and it is possible that his early experience of the river helped to formulate his mature sensibility. The light of the hour before twilight, the golden hour, is the one that he most conscientiously sought.

  His watercolour sketches of the river look as if they had been imbued with the light of the Thames, as if the water had washed over the paper and left its radiance there. He manages to evoke, too, the quickness and fluidity of the river; a cloud passes across the sun, a tree rattles in the breeze. The flow of the natural world—the flow of his paint—reproduces the flow of the river. In that sense the river becomes a unifying force, connecting the artist and the landscape. In some of the sketches there is nothing but the river glowing on the page of the sketchbook, an image of tranquillity and purity. It has been said that Turner was “rebaptised” by his artistic immersion in the water, and it is true that in his sketches he traces the old association between the river and spiritual grace.

  His oil paintings are generally of a more majestic temper, however, so that England: Richmond Hill, on the Prince Regent’s Birthday offers the view of the river as an emblem of national harmony and abundant peace. From his experience of the Thames he acquired a sense of history; he was naturally of an antiquarian temper, loving ruins and ancient stone, and in the sheer presence of the river he could discern the contours of old time. The Thames prompts within him intimations of ancientness, which is why he could place Dido and Aeneas upon its banks. On some occasions he even calls the Thames “Isis” in veneration of that ancient deity. But he also goes further back. In some of the sketches the river seems to revert to its prehistoric origins, with its marshes and its ancient trees.

  So he had a deep, and instinctive, notion of the river. When he painted nymphs beside the Thames he was intuitively following one of the archetypes of the river; they have always been the attendant spirits or divinities of the water, honoured by the Hebrews as well as the Greeks and Romans. The mythological as well as the natural aspects of the Thames guided his pencil and his brush; he could see into the heart of things. He had dreams, and visions, by the river.

  William Etty lived for much of his life, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, in a house on the corner of Buckingham Street; he overlooked the Thames, and one of his most celebrated paintings is that of the Thames at Chelsea. When he was in Italy he confessed that he “could not bear to desert old father Thames.” He had an affection for the river that generally touches those who live beside it. “I love to watch its ebb and flow,” he once said. “It has associations connected with life not unedifying.” But is it not life itself? There are numerous other nineteenth-century painters who depicted the river—Collins, Callcott, Stanfield as well as a whole genre of “marine painters” who took as their special inspiration the congregation of vessels small and large around London Bridge and its environs.

  Other painters did not necessarily portray the Thames, but were nevertheless drawn to live beside its banks. Zoffany lived near Kew, and is supposed to have used the fishermen of the Thames as the models for the Apostles in his depiction of the Last Supper. Kneller retired to Twickenham. Holman Hunt spent his last years in the Thameside village of Sonning. It seems deeply appropriate to spend old age by the Thames and to die beside the ever flowing river. Thomas Gainsborough never lived beside the river, but he requested that he should be buried by the Thames at Kew.

  The Pre-Raphaelites—among them Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Millais and Edward Burne-Jones—all lived by the river for some period of their artistic careers. But of that generation only James McNeill Whistler can be deemed a riverine artist who, in his series of Nocturnes, cast the veil of troubled twilight over the London waters. His is the river of mystery, the river that inspired the novelists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with intimations of enchantment; it is the river as reverie, as inspirer of dreams lending a fitful luminescence to the city itself. Yet in his series of etchings, Thames Set, he illustrated the working banks of the river from a characteristically low viewpoint, as if he were standing on the foreshore or sitting in a wherry experiencing all the dirt and pungency of the commercial Thames. From this vantage it is a world of mud, and planks, and bales, and what Charles Baudelaire described as “wonderful tangles of rigging, yardarms and rope.” Whistler had in fact been inspired by Baudelaire’s challenge to create “a new art of the river” as part of the art of the city. Baudelaire had been referring to the Seine, but for Whistler the archetypal urban river was the Thames.

  He dwelled for many years by the river in Chelsea, at various addresses, but on his arrival in England he lived among the sailors and dockers of Rotherhithe and Wapping. He drew the longshoremen and the prostitutes of the area, so that he might be said to have created an entire riverine world quite apart from the nineteenth-century city. The river changed his style, too, from the realism of the Thames Set (1860s) to the aestheticism of the Nocturnes (1870s). It is reported that for the latter he would be rowed to a point in the Thames that he found suitable; he would then contemplate the watery scene, and memorise its composition, before returning to his studio and starting work. It is perhaps significant that he is now buried in the same churchyard as William Hogarth, beside the river at Chiswick.

  The river can itself be deemed a work of art. A German traveller of the eighteenth century, Karl Philipp Moritz, found the banks of the Thames “fascinating” what made the riverine scenery “so magically beautiful” was “the blending of everything into a composition that ensures a peaceful prospect. There is no spot on which the eye does not long lovingly to rest.” In his History of the River Thames (1794–6) William Combe wrote that the hills of the Thames landscape “rise not to the clouds, but sink into the pastures, or pursue each other in pleasing perspective…and alluring shade” between Greenwich and Woolwich there is the prospect “of bold undulating ground.” In nineteenth-century studies it was recommended that Thames walkers stood in certain pre-arranged positions in order to view the most appropriate scene—so that, for example, a lock might “compose well” with a weir. The villages along the Thames were also known for their “picturesqueness.” Many professional painters earned a competent living by specialising in Thames “views,” and of course there were hordes of amateur artists who spent their holidays sketching and painting by the banks. Some places, such as Shiplake Lock, were painted over and over again; Shiplake, according to the early Thames photographer Henry Taunt, had “all the makings of a picture in its composition.” There is every reason to believe that the Thames is the most painted river in the world.

  The Thames was “captured” many times by professional photographers from the nineteenth century forward. Photographs of water scarcely resemble water; the liquid element cannot be “frozen” in time, because of course it loses its essential being. The nature of reflections in water, however, favours photographic reproduction; the stillness supports them, and the immobility maintains them.

  One of the moods conjured by the river is that of melancholy or nostalgia, so it is perhaps not surprising that many anthologies of Thames photographs have somewhat wistful titles such as Forgotten Thames, London’s Lost Riverscape or—more optimistically—London’s Riverscape Lost and Found. There is still much interest in Victorian photographs of the river, with images of wooden locks long since dismantled, of “shooting parties” on the water, of ancient weirs, and of mills demolished more than a century ago. The Thames was of course then more heavily used and populated, with an enormous number of craft to be seen upon its waters, but there is still the intense pleasure of continuity. There are many stretches where the view remains precisely the same, and this is nowhere more apt than in th
e images of the ancient bridges that cross the upper Thames.

  The river has also been compared to a scenic theatre, and there are river scenes at Abingdon and Nuneham that have been described as closely resembling some stage-set of the early twentieth century. According to Charles Harper’s Thames Valley Villages (1910) the riverine view is almost “impossibly picturesque,” with the illusion that behind it is “merely canvas and framework.” In that sense the aesthetic effects of the river may be said to divest it of its life.

  The list of twentieth-century artists who have painted the Thames is endless—from Monet and Kokoschka to Pasmore. Some contemporary artists paint nothing else. As one Thames painter of the late nineteenth century, Walter Greaves, put it, “I never seemed to have any ideas about painting. The river made me do it.” Paul Nash was enchanted, not to say obsessed, by the two hills overlooking the Thames known as the Wittenham Clumps. He wrote that “ever since I remember them the clumps have meant something to me. I felt their importance long before I knew their history…they were the pyramids of my small world.” He first depicted them in 1912, and continued to paint them. They emerge in such paintings as Landscape of the Summer Solstice, Landscape of the Vernal Equinox and Landscape of the Moon’s Last Phase. He believed the area of Wittenham by the river to be a “beautiful legendary country haunted by old gods long forgotten,” and sensed a “Pan-eish enchantment.”

  Of all twentieth-century artists, however, Stanley Spencer is the one most associated with the river. His enduring and everlasting subject is Cookham, a small village by the banks of the Thames between Marlow and Cliveden. The Holy Trinity Church was first erected here in 1140, on the site of a Saxon foundation; the inn, the Bell and Dragon, was established in the early fifteenth century. A wooden bridge was built in 1840, but was replaced by an iron version in 1867. Spencer was so identified with this place that, as a student of the Slade School of Fine Art, his nickname was “Cookham.” He took a phrase from William Morris, another artist of the river, and called the neighbourhood “an earthly paradise.” The river became a token of Eden, like the original rivers that flowed throughout the world.

  Spencer was also one of those artists of the Thames characterised by a profound egalitarianism—not the socialism of William Morris or the Cockney pugnacity of Turner, but what might be called the spiritual democracy of the humble soul. He had a reverence for the human form in an almost Blakean sense, and understood the holiness of creation. This, too, is part of the inheritance of the river. He said of his youthful experience that “we swim and look at the bank over the rushes. I swim right in the pathway of sunlight. I go home to breakfast thinking as I go of the beautiful wholeness of the day. During the morning I am visited, and walk about being in that visitation.” The allusion here to the sunlight reaffirms Spencer’s concern with the nature of light; some of his paintings, like those of Turner, are imbued with its sacredness. The river emanates light, both as a material and as an intellectual power. The light brings fertility, and lends form, to the natural world; but it is also the symbol of the understanding. The river is light; it is liquid light. For Spencer, as for Turner and other riverine artists, it is the halo of eternity.

  His immersion in the river, in the waters of the path of sunlight, reawakens his sense of the sacred. It has justly been said that in his work, and in his observations, Spencer is reverting to some pagan source of the Christian faith. But by what more appropriate agency than the river itself, that has welcomed pre-Christian and Christian ritual? He wrote to Edward Marsh, who had purchased his painting of Cookham 1914, that he was aware of “a new and personal value of the Englishness of England” his life by the Thames awakened that sense.

  Spencer always recalled his childhood by the river. Swan Upping at Cookham, depicting one of the ancient rituals of the Thames, seems to have the clairvoyance and over-brightness of childhood memory. He himself said of the work that “when I thought of people going on the river at that moment my mind’s imagination of it seemed to be an extension of the church atmosphere.” So the Thames becomes a church, just as its status as a sacred place is maintained in paintings such as the unfinished Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta and The Baptism in which Christ is being baptised in the holy river. One of his earliest drawings shows a fairy, or faery, sitting on a water-lily leaf upon the Thames. His sister recalled that the place chosen was part of the bank where the Spencer children once played; his infant vision is restored.

  In The Resurrection, Cookham the Thames is seen in the top left-hand corner as a band of light—a “bar of gold,” to use William Blake’s phrase—upon which a group of travellers sail towards the dawn sun. Of the passengers in the steam launch Spencer said that “the climax in heaven lay in the sunlit continuation of the marsh meadows beyond the bend in the river.” This is very much like his childhood memory of swimming in the path of the sunlight, and suggests how much his own experience of the Thames formed his mature artistic vision. So what is the nature of his work? He combines a dream-like extravagance with a visionary simplicity and a sense of timelessness. All of these attributes are elicited by the river. The artist Isaac Rosenberg once wrote of Spencer that “his pictures have that sense of everlastingness, of no beginning and no end, that we get in all masterpieces.” Rosenberg here might be defining the river itself, without beginning and without end; the congruence suggests that the river is the form as well as the content of Spencer’s inspiration.

  Artists such as Greaves and Spencer are as closely associated with the river as their seventeenth-and eighteenth-century counterparts; if the river represents continuity of any kind, it represents continuity of inspiration. In all of its manifestations it is the same river, with demonstrably the same banks and the same dimensions; yet it has become so various in its manifestations that, like Proteus, it seems to change its identity without changing its essential nature. It is as if the artist saw a true reflection in the moving water of the Thames.

  CHAPTER 38

  The Words of the River

  The literature of the river is voluminous. Some of it is skittish and whimsical, some of it profound. There are many books, inspired by the Thames, that are explicitly or implicitly written for children. Once again the river is associated with innocence. The river elicits dream narratives. It also encourages stories of embarkation and separation. And of course it provokes the themes of time, fate and destiny. There seems to be a tendency, in the writers of prose, to break into verse in the course of their narratives—as if the river itself elicited a less than prosaic response. The actual descriptions of river journeys are in fact more eventful, more replete with meaning, than the calm physical experience of the Thames. In that sense it has become a river of words, endlessly created and re-created by the writers who have voyaged upon it.

  The writers of the early twentieth century use the river as a commentary upon the ravages of time and the decline of earlier values—even though the modern world which they abhor has, in turn, become a blessed past of which we regret the passing. Thus in the second volume of Thames Valley Villages (1910) Charles G. Harper excoriates the sounds of the contemporaneous world impinging upon the calm of the Middlesex bank of the river with “the strains of a piano organ, the cries of the hawkers, or the squeaking of tramcar-wheels against curves.” Who, in the twenty-first century, would not like to hear those sounds? The sighing of the wind through the trees, and the splash of water by the banks, remain simply the same. The noises of another age would in contrast be deeply exciting. The Thames plays strange tricks with time.

  The prose accounts of rivers have an ancient history. The first volume entirely devoted to the subject seems to have been that of Ctesias, court physician to Artaxerxes Memnon, who was writing at the beginning of the fourth century BC. Three hundred years later the first Chinese study of the rivers appeared, and was eventually to be known as “the Waterways Classic” when the book was revised in the sixth century AD, it had grown immeasurably in length.

  We may date the
first English accounts of rivers, however, to the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in the works of Leland, Camden and Harrison. There had been incidental references to the Thames before that time by historical chroniclers, such as Bede and Gildas, but there had been no serious or sustained account of the river. John Leland may be described as the first professional traveller, whose Itinerary became a model and an inspiration for his contemporaries. In the spring of 1542 he progressed along the Thames Valley, and left observations upon the riverside towns of Maidenhead and Reading, Faringdon and Wallingford. His was an anecdotal and perambulatory style, a collection of notes rather than a coherent narrative. Nevertheless he contributed material of immense interest to those who are concerned with the history of the Thames:

  Two or three miles after crossing the River Burne I came to the timber bridge over the Thames at Maidenhead. A little above the bridge on this bank of the Thames I saw a cliff overhanging the river with some bushes growing on it. I conjectured that this had been the site of some ancient building. There is a large wharf for timber and firewood at the west end of the bridge…

  Leland has some claim to being the progenitor of modern English history, but he was also the first English writer to formulate the river poem in Cygnea Cantio (1545). He wished to create a river that would coexist on the levels of mythology, literature and history. In this poem the Thames is described as “nympharum gloria prima”—the “most glorious of the nymphs” descended from Hesiod and from Homer.