Victorians on the Thames
11 December 2010 - 2 May 2011
'Escaping the city' brings together the Museum's paintings and artefacts with loans from other private and public collections to explore the importance of the River Thames as a holiday destination and an escape from the chaos of Victorian city life. This popular and familiar area of Thames history will be enriched by analysing the role that London life, wages, holiday entitlement and the railway played in encouraging all sorts of people to spend their leisure time up stream. The exhibition will look at how the boating boom brought many advantages to boat builders, hotels and pubs through 19th century photographs, adverts and signs. With illustrations and anecdotes from the Lock to Lock Times and Illustrated London News, it will tell the history of numerous regattas and guide books along with boating fashions and costumes. Work by artists Frederick William Watts and George Dunlop Leslie will be included to highlight the Thames as a source of artistic inspiration and the role these artists may have played in advertising the river's picturesque countryside.
Highlights of the exhibition include: one of James Tissot's most famous paintings 'On the Thames' kindly loaned from Hepworth Wakefield, the reunion of two paintings by Frederick William Watts thought to have not been seen together since 1839 and a late Victorian dingy which will be displayed for the first time.
