Barges Along the Thames (Battersea Reach) , c. early 1870s. Oil on canvas; 18 x 24 inches (45.7 x 61 cm). Private collection. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
This undated painting definitely shows the influence of James McNeill Whistler, as does much of Lawson's early work. It portrays a solitary woman trudging along Cheyne Walk near the Thames in the days prior to the construction of the Chelsea Embankment. The time is twilight and the atmosphere is misty, the atmospheric conditions also much loved by Whistler. Boatmen are seen working as their boats move slowly along the Thames. Trees are prominent in the foreground as in his closely related Cheyne Walk of 1870. Lawson painted many such views of Chelsea and the Thames in his early career making discovering its original title difficult.
Stanley Weintraub considered Lawson the most important of Whistler's early followers: "The artist who had been, perhaps, Whistler's earliest disciple (but for the Greaves brothers, who were more primitive than they were sophisticated painters), died in 1882. Cecil Lawson painted the crumbling, picturesque pre-Embankment Thames which Whistler had celebrated in The Last of Old Westminster and his early etchings, and in 1873 did a canvas, Twilight Grey, which was his attempt at a 'moonlight,' although he violated Whistler dicta by inserting a Japanese full moon, vast and yellow, in his sky. After his 1878 Grosvenor gallery show his landscapes and riverscapes, often Pre-Raphaelite in detail yet Whistlerian in mood, were so much in demand yet produced in such modest quantities that they brought great prices while still on the easel" (274).
Even contemporary critics recognized the impact of Whistler on Lawson's work. The Architect pointed out such influences in a review of the Grosvenor Gallery exhibition in 1879: "The defects of Mr. Whistler are easy to copy, and find ready imitators. Self-asserting eccentricity reappears in its followers as impudent carelessness or inefficient ambition. It is not without apprehension that we trace the influence of 'Whistlerism' on the rising talent of Mr. Cecil Lawson, the landscape artist, whose evident delight in atmospheric truth and the scenery of rural England may not save him from trying to mislead the public and delude himself into a belief that he is a second Turner" (290).
Bibliography
"Studies in the Grosvenor Gallery -II." The Architect XXI (17 May 1879): 289-91.
Weintraub, Stanley. Whistler A Biography. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1975. 274-75.
Created 12 June 2023