William Marlow is probably best known for his views of London and the Thames, but much of his work is influenced and informed by his experiences travelling in France and Italy in the 1760s. In my previous blog post I mentioned the painting 'The Waterworks at London Bridge on Fire' (1779) by Marlow bears an distinct resemblance to his earlier painting titled 'Vesuvius Erupting at Night' (1768) [see below].

This painting from the Berger Collection of the Denver Art Museum in Colorado. The gallery website states that it is '...the first by a British artist to represent the subject. He exhibited the painting at the Society of Artists exhibition in London in 1768, prompting this rapturous response from a reviewer: “A dreadful scene! but so elegant is the execution . . . that while we look with pleasure on its beauties, we cannot help getting into the belief that we are indeed on the spot, and really beholding an eruption of that terrible volcano.”'

The more famous depiction of Vesuvius erupting is by Joseph Wright of Derby: 'Vesuvius in Eruption, with a View over the Islands in the Bay of Naples (c.1776-80) from the Tate Collection [see below].

During his lifetime Wright painted more than 30 views of the erupting volcano, despite the fact that given the dates he was in Italy he was unlikely to actually witnessed the event.

Joseph Wright of Derby's paintings of Vesuvius and other subjects are frequently referenced in terms of the age of Enlightenment and the Romantic obsession with the sheer power of nature, but Marlow rarely gets a mention. The Government Art Collection holds a further work by Marlow on the subject titled 'View of Vesuvius' and another, 'An extensive view of the Bay of Naples from Pausilipo, with Vesuvius beyond' is in private hands [see below].

Interestingly Marlow's works have often been attributed to better known artists such as Joseph Wright of Derby and Richard Wilson. With so little information available on his life and career, it does rather seem he hasn't received much credit despite his works being held in such high esteem and in terms of 'Vesuvius Erupting at Night', of considerable cultural significance too.

In 1779 William Marlow painted The Waterworks at London Bridge on Fire. The conflagration of the title is captured by the artist in a spectacularly powerful painting, his palette an array of hot colours that range from pearly pinks to searing red hot ochre. It’s an incandescent disaster scene and it’s as compelling as a car crash. But did it actually happen? The answer is yes, during the Great Fire of 1666 - but that was over a century before Marlow produced his painting in 1779 and it would be years before London’s riverside would go up in smoke again in such spectacular fashion.

First, a quick history of the London Bridge Waterworks. In 1582, the Dutchman Pieter Maritz designed a complicated system to supply 'fresh' water from the Thames to private houses in the City of London. The resulting apparatus worked so well that in a demonstration to City officials it forced a jet of river water over the spire of the church of St Magnus the Martyr. The original works were destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, but they were replaced by a new system designed by Maritz's grandson which remained in use until the early nineteenth century when it was removed as part of the demolition of old London Bridge and the building of its replacement.

So why did William Marlow make a painting of it on fire in 1779? I have a theory that the artist, who had been travelling extensively in France and Italy in the 1760s, was using the familiar view of London and its river as a stage on which to recreate some of the more picturesque and dramatic scenes he witnessed and recorded.

Whether or not there was an actual fire at the London Bridge Waterworks in the second half of the eighteenth century I have yet to discover, but Marlow's depiction of a Thames-side fire represents an intriguing impulse of artists to paint the combination of fire and water in the recognisable location of London. An obvious later example is by JMW Turner who gave London his impression of The Burning of the Houses of Parliament (c. 1834-5).

Some decades earlier, in 1791, a fire at Albion Mills on the south bank of the Thames was depicted in a colour print by Thomas Rowlandson, an artist better known for his satirical works.

Three Thames fires, three artists and three very different representations of riverside conflagrations. Of course, the ultimate opportunity to feel the burn in paint occurred more than a century earlier in 1666 when Marlow's event is possibly set [I am currently researching this to see if my theory has weight]. This mother of all London blazes was captured by 17th-century artists, probably from abroad, who were creating bird's-eye views of the capital. Their names have been swallowed up by history and the enormity of the event they described with their brushes and imported landscape techniques. For example, there’s the famous view of the Great Fire taken from a position in the west on the south bank. This fiery view has been dated from around 1675 and it’s to be found, appropriately enough, in the collection of the Museum of London.

This view is very much in the Dutch landscape style, and this can also be found in a work by Lieve Verschuier who painted a similar scene, but this time from the north bank to the east of the devastation. This painting has finally come to rest in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. There are others.

So much water and so many flames. But it’s Marlow I want to return to. His painting of The Waterworks at London Bridge on Fire (1779), I propose, presents a watershed (no pun intended) in British art in terms of the way the capital city was projected to new audiences. It’s a piece of theatre and the raging fire takes centre stage, spluttering flames into the sky like distress flares from a stricken vessel. Smoke billows skyward and drifts to the east, partially obscuring the domed square tower of St Magnus-the-Martyr, a church that had stood since the 12^th century and had itself been destroyed by the Great Fire, standing less than 300 yards from the infamous bakery in Pudding Lane. It was rebuilt between 1671 and 1687 under the direction of Sir Christopher Wren. To the lower right of the image is London Bridge itself, not in its 17th-century guise complete with teetering buildings, but a sturdy and solid stone construction. It is in fact that original bridge, but with the improvements made to it by George Dance the Elder and completed in 1762. Under the supervision of Dance the Elder, the roadway was widened and a Gothic-style balustrade was added together with fourteen stone alcoves providing pedestrian shelter. The old bridge would finally be demolished in 1831 when John Rennie’s New London Bridge was built alongside it.

The intensity of the blaze is emphasised through Marlow’s masterful use of chiaroscuro, the dark – almost blackened – shadows to the right of the painting contrasting with the reflected light from the flames. But within this darkness, and also in the left foreground are small boats supporting onlookers who direct our own gaze towards the burning waterworks. The river is studded with such spectator boats. Closer still to the conflagration are the hoards of thrillseekers who spill out onto the riverside forecourt of Fishmongers’ Hall, itself not long for this world at the time. It was designed by architect Edward Jerman and opened in 1671. It’s fate was sealed alongside that of London Bridge when it was demolished to facilitate the construction the new bridge in 1827. To emphasise this architectural impermanence – St Magnus, London Bridge and Fishmongers’ Hall were in this present incarnation all less than a century old after all,  Marlow’s fire not only dominates the scene, it and its smoke obliterates the view of the Monument - a memorial to the Great Fire - which would have otherwise attracted the eye to what was potentially a problematic anachronism.

Or was there really a fire in the 1770s? I'll get back to you on that.

My current research focuses on the interconnected careers of Samuel Scott and William Marlow, two 18th-century artists known for their painted views of London and the River Thames but whose contribution to British art remains relatively unexplored.

Following a theme from my PhD thesis ('A Forest of Masts: The Image of the River Thames in the Long Eighteenth Century'), this project is centred around paintings of the Thames by Scott and Marlow and their contemporaries. I am interested in how representations of London’s river appear to form a distinct category within eighteenth-century visual culture and how artists set out to capture the significance of the burgeoning port city. For example, Scott and Marlow both produced London views featuring such improvements as the building of Westminster Bridge and the construction of the Adelphi Terrace. I will consider how this magnificence is sometimes set against tantalising glimpses of workaday maritime activity in the wharves and dockyards.

Samuel Scott was described by George Vertue as among London's ‘most elevated men in art’ and by the 1730s he was England's leading marine artist whose associates included Thomas Hudson, George Lambert, Horace Walpole, Marcellus Laroon and William Hogarth; his friendship with the latter enshrined in Ebenezer Forrest’s famous account of ‘The Five Days’ Peregrination’. Evidence of Scott’s contemporary reputation beyond his involvement with the Society of Artists, Vauxhall Gardens and the Foundling Hospital is evidenced by the prestigious commissions from clients that included Sir Robert Walpole, the East India Company, the Duke of Bedford and Admiral Vernon. My research will closely follow the shape of Scott’s career through a close reading of key works and the historical significance of the events they represent. Furthermore, research into Scott’s biography will seek to shine light on how his relationships with fellow artists and patrons influenced his choice of subjects, from famous naval engagements to Thames views.  

William Marlow’s tutelage under Scott in his Covent Garden studio in the 1750s extended into a lifelong friendship and both artists eventually moved to the fashionable upriver Thames location of Twickenham. I will examine his career from membership of the St Martin’s Lane Academy, friendships with Sawrey Gilpin and Joshua Reynolds, and promotion to Vice President of the Society of Artists. Above all, I will follow Marlow's extensive travels through France and Italy to ascertain how his experiences abroad relate to his celebrated views of the Thames.

In the early years of the 19^th century, the British romantic artist William Blake painted a very strange and brownish picture he called The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan. For many years art historians have pored over Blake’s work for secret symbols, hidden messages and coded narratives, but this one seems quite straightforward so long as we have the title to guide us through the oddness of the image. The painting’s central character is a golden haired, haloed man who is naked save for a pair of skimpy pants. Despite his state of undress, he is poised heroically as he controls with apparent ease some sort of serpentine, scaly monster. Trapped within this monster’s muscly coils are various naked figures in a selection of helpless poses, some inverted, as they desperately wrestle to free themselves. At the bottom of this circular composition of writhing snake and disorientated bodies lie two figures, one white slumped and one black huddled, both apparently exhausted from the struggle. All around flames lick out as if this some hellish detail taken from The Last Judgement. What can all this have to do with Admiral Lord Nelson? To uncover the meaning behind Blake’s nightmarish vision we need to turn to history and consider what it was that made Nelson so famous. His two momentous achievements were the British victory over the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile in 1798, and the defeat of the French and Spanish navies at the Battle of Trafalgar, fought off Cape Trafalgar on the Spanish coast, during which he was killed in 1805. These victories set the scene for what would be a century of British naval supremacy, ultimately underpinning the expansion of Empire. Those are the two main attributes that are conjured up by the idea – the cult of Nelson – naval power and imperialism. So was this Blake’s tribute to Nelson? He certainly worked on the painting for about four years from around the time of Nelson’s death. Meanwhile other leading artists such as John Flaxman and Benjamin West were producing much more sober and monumental pieces to feed the outpouring of national pride in - and grief over the loss of Nelson, the naval hero. But what Blake has done, as we might expect Blake to do, is to subvert the very idea of these catalytic events, synthesising a personification of the impact of them via Nelson himself. What Blake is saying here is that, at the very least, this extreme hero worship is all highly questionable. So if this isn’t a tribute to a war hero, it an attack on the flabby thinking that implies imperialism is necessarily a good thing. But even if Blake’s commentary is barbed, he still holds Nelson and turn-of-the-century Britain in considerable esteem. In Blake’s painting we know that the all-but-naked figure is Nelson. There he stands, nonchalantly heroic, holding what, on closer inspection, turns out to be a representation of a thunderbolt. Multi-tasking Nelson also finds time to direct a serpent-like creature, which we know by the title is intended to represent the Old Testament sea monster, Leviathan, here shown wrapping itself around its apparent victims. When Blake showed his painting in a private exhibition in London in 1809, alongside its companion Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth (c.1805), it was number 1, and the accompanying description explained that it is the sea creature that: ‘…in whose wreathings are infolded the Nations of the Earth’. We can guess that Blake is probably making reference to those nations with which Britain was at war, but they might also be her colonies, here shown caught in a sinister maritime Empire represented by the giant sea snake. Blake most probably would have condemned such an Empire. With this painting and its pendant featuring Pitt, Blake is showing the two leaders as bringers of apocalyptic war, even if Blake appreciated that the campaign against Napoleon was just and righteous. As I have described, Blake’s Nelson stands over the huddled figure of a manacled black man, presumably a slave and highlighting the role of the Royal Navy in suppressing the slave trade after it was made illegal in the British Empire in 1807. It has been suggested that Bake may have seen the modern British Empire as enacting a divine plan for the world, making way for the millennium through acts of regenerative destruction (see F. David Peat (2007) Pathways of Chance [Pari Publishing], p. 127). Here then, Nelson guides a pathway through the chaos of the modern world by controlling a writhing sea monster symbolising an all powerful Britain as it flexes its maritime muscle. If Blake’s Nelson really is paving the way for the millennium, what if we now turn our attention to another artwork representing the actual turn of the millennium nearly two hundred years later? It is Quantum Cloud (1999) by Anthony Gormley. Gormley’s sculpture stands on the south bank of the river Thames adjacent to the Millennium Dome on the North Greenwich peninsula. Famous for his work The Angel of the North (1998) near Gateshead in Tyne and Wear, Quantum Cloud is actually a third taller at 30 metres. At the time of its unveiling it was the tallest sculpture in the United Kingdom. Constructed from tetrahedral units made from 1.5 metre long sections of steel, the pieces were arranged using a computer model with a random walk algorithm starting from points on the surface of an enlarged figure based on Gormley’s body that forms a residual outline at the centre of the sculpture. In designing Quantum Cloud, Gormley was influenced by Basil Hiley, quantum physicist (and long-time colleague of David Bohm). The idea for Quantum Cloud came from Hiley's thoughts on pre-space as a mathematical structure underlying space-time and matter, and his comment that “algebra is the relationship of relationships”. The comment was made during a conversation between Gormley, Hiley and writer David Peat at a 1999 London gathering of artists and scientists, organized by Peat. This is all very interesting, but above and beyond the quantum physics, what do we as the audience see in this work? Most people encounter it for the first time when exploring the Millennium Dome (O2) venue, or using the cable car that crosses the Thames nearby and provides a bird’s-eye view of Gormley’s sculpture. To my mind, Gormley’s Millennium Man is just as much trapped inside the neo-modern metallic cloud of his time as Blake’s idea of Nelson, encircled by the writhing leviathan. Sections of this entry are informed either directly or indirectly by the David Blayney Brown's entry on Blake published in the exhibition catalogue Artist and Empire [Tate, 2015]. 

Under the Influence: John Deakin and the Lure of Soho, The Photographers' Gallery until 13 July