LONDON IS ONE of the most frequently depicted cities in the world, attracting foreign and native painters for over three centuries, from the jobbing view-taker to some of the great European masters. Its extremes of urban topography and variety of street life, experienced under swiftly changing light and weather, account for much of this detailed pictorial biography. Perhaps only Paris can compare with it in this respect, although Venice runs it close, albeit with a narrower focus. Of course, the appeal of London has not been purely visual; it has been the subject of extensive social comment from Hogarth onwards. For the most part this has entailed scenes of poverty and deprivation or ones of finger-wagging contrast, particularly by artists and photographers in the nineteenth century. At the other extreme is London as a scene of pageantry and processions, of coronations and state funerals.

Many aspects of these themes are explored in exhibitions this year which sees the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the Olympic Games. Dickens and London, which ran at the Museum of London until 10th June, came as close as might be possible to the city streets that Dickens knew, through shop signs, posters, doorknockers and famous images by W.P. Frith and Luke Fildes. Dickens took the measure of every kind of London street, alley and square, from the ‘brand-new’ suburb where the ‘brand-new’ Veneerings lived, to the squalor of the Thameside courts, visualised in forensic detail, in Our Mutual Friend. Recently published, The London Square by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan reminds us of Dickens’s reaction to this very London institution. How quickly he takes the demographic temperature of, for example, Golden Square, reduced to tenements and on the way to nowhere, through to the respectable façades of Mayfair and Bloomsbury squares with their ‘dowager frigidity’. The exhibition on Dickens and the art of his time at the Watts Gallery, Compton (to 28th October; to be reviewed in next month’s issue) examines, in particular, the realist painting and illustration that parallels the writer’s descriptions of London and his social concerns, and works inspired by his novels.

At Tate Britain (to 16th September) Dickens’s London has many twentieth-century echoes in a show of photographs of the city ranging from 1930 to 1980 taken by celebrated foreign photographers including Brandt, Cartier-Bresson and Penn. At the Victoria & Albert Museum (to 12th August) the home-grown talents of British designers from 1948 (the year of the last London Olympic Games) to the present are explored in all media – from distinctive textiles of the 1950s and the impact of the Festival of Britain up to the slick products of current ad agencies and design consultants. Covering nearly the same period of time is The Queen: Art and Image, the touring exhibition now at the National Portrait Gallery (to 21st October; it was reviewed at an earlier showing in the October 2011 issue). It goes, as it were, for the Jubilee jugular with innumerable, highly contrasting portraits that take in the wintry eminence of Annigoni’s famous painting of 1954–55 and the poignant photograph by Thomas Struth of 2011. If it contains rather more image than art, the show is nevertheless a revealing indication of official and unofficial taste through sixty years.

In memorable exhibitions on London in recent decades, the Thames invariably featured large but it occupies centre stage in the current show Royal River at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich (to 9th September). It is a rich and impressive investigation of the Thames as a site of pomp and pleasure, of processions and pageants and as a conduit of power. This theme is sensationally introduced at the very start of the show with Canaletto’s London: The Thames on Lord Mayor’s Day, looking towards the City and St Paul’s Cathedral, the first occasion on which the picture has been lent to London from the Lobkowicz Collections since it was painted in c.1750. This alone is worth a visit to Greenwich.

In a Tudor prelude, we find Henry VIII almost constantly afloat as he is conveyed between the three great royal palaces – Hampton Court, Whitehall and Greenwich – very often to inaugurate his latest consort and to show her off to the crowds. Thereafter a visitor is taken on a grand tour of great occasions from the coronation of Anne Boleyn through riverside fireworks for James II to the Lord Mayor’s annual pageants and Lord Nelson’s sombre funeral procession of 1806. There are, however, many tributaries into the leading narrative – the livery companies and watermen, James Thornhill’s Painted Hall at Greenwich, the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall, Ranelagh and Kew, the notorious ‘Great Stink’ of 1858 and the visionary engineers and architects associated with the taming and cleaning of the river. Particularly striking is the extreme competence of many anonymous artists and craftsmen who beautified the processional barges (Fig.I) and recorded public events. The accompanying catalogue is a mine of unfamiliar illustrations and informative texts.1

1    Catalogue: Royal River. Power, Pageantry & the Thames. Edited by Susan Doran with Robert J. Blyth. 292 pp. incl. 246 col. ills. + figs. (Royal Museums Greenwich and Scala, London, 2012), £25 (PB). ISBN 978–1–85759–700–4. Hardback edition available.