Attributed to Francis Swaine

(London circa 1720-1782)

Thames shipping, a pair each 27 x 36.2cm (10 5/8 x 14 1/4in). (2)

Footnotes

Provenance
Jonathan Janson, UK.

In the first drawing, a tall church spire is apparently St. Brides, Fleet Street. There is a small cutter-rigged hoy on the far left, a Thames peter boat fishing at 5 o'clock below it and a rowed lighter carrying sawn planks in the foreground. There is a City of London barge leading a larger barge in the centre of the composition, the latter with an unreadable design on the flag astern.

In Ralph Hyde's A Prospect of Britain: the town panoramas of Samuel and Nathaniel Buck (London, 1994), this drawing clearly relates to both the right side of Plate 42, the third of five (Plates 40-44) comprising the Buck panorama of London from Westminster Bridge to the Tower, and the left side of Plate 43: the Buck version has moved the barges and lighter further west (left) from the drawing and they are on Plate 42, with the second barge - rather than the stern of the first - centred squarely in front of St Bride's (no. 47 in the Buck key), and the 'Fleet Ditch' (no. 49, with the small bridge over it) shifted to the left edge of Plate 43 in front of the square tower of St Sepulchre's (no. 50, but of which there is barely a trace on the drawing). The wide stairs off a square to the right of the Fleet are Blackfriars Stairs (no. 51).

Plate 42's inscription says the view (from the south side of the river) was taken 'from Mr Everard's summer-House opposite to St Bride's Church' and that Plate 43 was from 'the West part of the Leads of St Mary Overy's church in Southwark' (i.e. Southwark Cathedral today)

In the second drawing, there is an upstream barge at the riverfront in the background and a small four-oared and cabined barge at left of the sort used for official purposes such as the Navy Board and other government offices. There are lots of passenger wherries shown with pairs of oars and a typical Thames jetty (or 'bridge') of the grander sort, with stairs at the end, from which they operated before the river was embanked.

In Ralph Hyde's A Prospect of Britain: the town panoramas of Samuel and Nathaniel Buck (London, 1994), this drawing is a coherent single study for the right side of Plate 43 and shows the view east of St Paul's. On the very left edge there is just the ghost of the spires of St Austin's (no. 65 in the Buck key) and Christ Church (no. 66) right up against the east end of St Paul's. St Mildred's (no. 67) and St James Garlickhythe (no. 68), also close together, are the first two spires more clearly visible to the right. The last relatively low steeple at far right (as in the print) is St Michael's Bassingshaw (no. 82). The 'bridge' jetty ending in stairs end seen on the drawing is identified on the prints as Steelyard Stairs (no. 76, on the site of Cannon Street Station today), with the three churches immediately behind being St Mary Aldermary (no. 73, square tower with pinnacle corners), St Michael, Colarts Hill (no. 74, spire) and the tallest spire that of St Mary-le-Bow (no. 75).

Most of the vessels shown in the drawings reappear in the prints; slightly bigger or smaller, repositioned, with slight differences of detail but generally recognisable. All the Buck London panorama plates bear the same imprint date of 11 September 1749. It is a credible hypothesis that the pencilling of the background may be something Samuel Buck provided and asked Swaine (if it was Swaine) to supply the shipping taken from the same two viewpoints. The changes in the prints - of scale, slight detail, and positioning - would then have been those effected in transfer-copying by others, with the drawings generally more convincing as by someone who knew what they were doing in nautical terms. If Swaine did it, it would have been when he was in his early to mid-20s for things printed in 1749.


We would like to thank Dr. Pieter van der Merwe for his help in cataloguing this lot.