This little-known drawing belongs to a series of views of the Thames made by Wenceslaus Hollar and traditionally dated to Hollar’s first visit to London in around 1638. The present sheet is closely related to a smaller dated study now in the Clement C. Moore Collection and a larger drawing in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham.[1] All three drawings show a view of Lambeth Palace, the London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, from the northern bank of the Thames looking west. Fascinatingly all three drawings are taken from different positions close to the palace of Westminster and consequently have differing degrees of focus, angle and scope. This drawing was clearly made on the Thames foreshore, possibly standing on the pier which appears in the foreground of both the Moore Collection and Birmingham sheets, the lower viewing angle allowed Hollar to produce a focussed study of the architecture of Lambeth Palace. Taken together the three drawings of this view underscore Hollar’s remarkable efforts to accurately record the topography of London and give valuable insights into complex working methods. The inscription on the present sheet suggests it was made during Hollar’s second residence in London from 1651. Lambeth Palace is described as formerly the seat of the archbishop.
Wencesclaus Hollar was born in Prague into a prosperous Protestant family. Sectarian politics drove him from Prague as a young man and he spent time in Stuttgart, Strasbourg and Frankfurt, where he worked for the Swiss-born engraver Matthäus Merian the Elder. Hollar made tours up the Rhine to Mainz in 1632 and downstream to Amsterdam in 1634 and a large number of topographical studies survive, including a sketchbook now in the John Rylands Library, Manchester. The Cologne publisher Abraham Hogenberg issued Hollar’s first major prints, a set of views from Prague to the Dutch coast and a set of small portraits capturing the costumes of inhabitants of different parts of Europe. The arrival of Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of Arundel as ambassador to the emperor Ferdinand II in Cologne seems to have been a decisive moment in Hollar’s career. Hollar travelled to London in December 1636 where he was given lodgings at Arundel House. The initial idea seems to have been for Hollar to reproduce works of art then in Arundel’s collection, one of the most advanced assembled in Britain. But in the end Hollar only made four plates based on works in Arundell’s possession, he instead produced a diverse range of prints. A group of some fort-five drawings by Hollar survive recording scenes in England, including an important series of topographical views of London made from the river.
This drawing is unusual for its careful delineation of Lambeth Palace, showing the structure as it was during the interregnum. Hollar was drawing London at a complex moment in British history; in May 1640 Archbishop Laud became the focus for public dissatisfaction with Charles I’s Personal Rule and a large group attacked Lambeth Palace, arrests were made and at least one of the attackers was hanged and quartered. In 1649 Oliver Cromwell established the Commonwealth and the positions of bishops and archbishops were abolished. Lambeth Palace was used as a barracks for the army and a prison for royalist ministers. Hollar shows the east side of Lambeth protected by a stockade and this drawing appears to be the only accurate record of the complex made during the interregnum.
Plotted first in graphite or black chalk, the drawing was then carefully drawn with a fine nibbed pen in black ink and articulated with careful washes in grey and brown. Hollar enlivens the view with a multitude of city life: river craft are shown on the Thames foreshore and in mid-stream, a barge is shown under sail, whilst a figure on the right is shown apparently urinating against the wall in the foreground. The precise relationship of this drawing to the Moore sheet and the larger drawing now in the Barber Institute in Birmingham is not completely apparent, although it seems likely that the present drawing was prepared specifically to commemorate the appearance of Lambeth Palace as seen from Westminster. In both the Moore and Barber drawings the palace itself is shown as a distant, schematic architectural mass, in the present drawing it is carefully drawn and titled ‘Lambeth olim Palatium Archi Episcopi Cantaurienisis’. This labelling might indicate that Hollar had a print in mind, it is a feature shared with other Thameside drawings, for example a view of Whitehall from Lambeth, now in the British Museum (accession number 1859.0806.390). This focus may account for the shift in viewing position. Both the Moore and Birmingham sheets have a wider focus capturing more of the northern bank of the river; the Birmingham sheet shows a row of houses and gardens before Westminster Hall. It is the retaining wall of these gardens which appears in the foreground of the Moore sheet, with the buttressed wall of the palace of Westminster beyond. In the present drawing Hollar is standing closer to the first garden wall, concealing the second and giving a clearer and more focused view of Lambeth Palace itself.
Hollar’s views of London constitute the most important graphic source of the city before the eighteenth-century, as such, they have always been enormously desirable. Their survival also formed an important element in the emerging narratives about the development of British landscape painting. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scholars were able to incorporate Hollar’s landscape drawings into the emerging teleology of British landscape, seeing in Hollar both a verisimilitude and technical quality which pointed to the works of eighteenth-century topographical artists. More importantly, Hollar’s use of wash, as in this sheet, offered a powerful pre-history for the British interest in watercolour. Hollar is now increasingly viewed as a remarkable European lens on Britain at a political fraught moment, capturing the final years of pre-Civil War London. In the case of this beautiful drawing, the heavily fortified Lambeth Palace is recorded by Hollar in the midst of the interregnum.
Wenceslaus Hollar
The Thames from the Head of Westminster Pier with Lambeth House in the distance, 1638
Pen and black ink and grey wash
2 ½ x 5 3/8 inches; 65 x 137 mm
Signed, inscribed and dated 1638
Morgan Library, New York, promised gift of Clement C and Elizabeth Y Moore
References
- Alena Volrábová, Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-1677): Drawings, Prague, 2017, cats.17 and 18, pp.281-282. For an excellent discussion of the Moore drawing see: eds. John Marciari and Jane Shoaf Turner, Far and Away: Drawings from the Clement C. Moore Collection, exh. cat., New York (The Morgan Library & Museum), 2024, pp.140-141.
