Limehouse

James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) focused many of his works on the Thames. He stayed at a pub in the unfashionable area of Wapping during 1859, so that he could have easy access to London's docklands and produced a set of sixteen etchings whic hhe called The Thames Set. He chose sites which were threatened by the creation of the river embankment, and began recording their vanishing 'beauties'.

Baudelaire greatly admired these prints when they were exhibited in Paris in 1862. He described them as 'representing the banks of the Thames: wonderful tangles of rigging, yardarms and rope, a hotchpotch of fog, furnaces and corkscrews of smoke: the profound and intricate poetry of a vast capital'.

These etchings established Whistler's reputation in Britain, France and America. The harbour-master's bow-windowed house was on Broadway Wharf, on the north bank of the Thames. A distant sign reads 'CURTIS GIN', a distillery company on the Mile End Road. The deeply etched lines, heavy foul biting and fine detail, convey a gritty realism.

This etching may have been what inspired the French critic Charles Baudelaire im 1862 when he praised Whistler for etching 'wonderful tangles of rigging, yardarms and rope … the profound and intricate poetry of a vast capital.'