Twelve paintings show London over more than two centuries, from a gambling den painted by Hogarth to Hockney's portrait of two fashion designers, finished in 1971.
Coal smoke made the city hard to paint. It hid the river in fog, and one of London's critics drove a painter into court over a picture of fireworks. Artists came anyway, from Venice and Paris as well as from London's own streets.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
How These Were Chosen
London offered two subjects. The first was the Thames, the city's main road and its port, crowded with barges, ships and bridges. In the nineteenth century the smoke of countless chimneys thickened the river air into a haze that blurred every outline, and artists came from abroad to study it.
The second subject waited away from the water, in streets, stations and private rooms. There, crowds, trades and ceremonies could be watched from a window or from the edge of the pavement.
To make this list, a picture had to be set in a real London place that can still be found on a map, from a station platform to a bend of the river. Half of the twelve look at the Thames, and several of the best known were made by visitors.
The entries count down from twelve to one. Only one of them, Monet's view of Waterloo Bridge, takes the fog itself as its subject.
12. William Powell Frith, The Railway Station (1862)
At the right edge of the crowded platform in The Railway Station, two detectives take hold of a man just as he steps into a carriage. William Powell Frith, a painter of busy modern scenes, finished the canvas in 1862.
The platform belongs to Paddington, the London station whose great vault of iron and glass, lit by gas, had opened eight years earlier. Around the arrest, Frith packs in a whole city on the move.
A bride takes a tearful leave of her bridesmaids, recruits head off to the army, and a porter finds a dog hidden under a passenger's shawl. Everyone here is setting off, except the man held by the detectives, the one passenger who will not.
The canvas was sold before it was finished. Louis Victor Flatow, a London dealer, paid Frith 4,500 pounds for the picture, the preparatory sketches and the reproduction rights, and another 750 pounds for the exclusive right to show it.
The sum was large enough to make the news. The Times judged that "the subject and price of Mr. Frith's picture alike belong to the time."
To earn his money back, Flatow charged admission. From April to September 1862, he showed The Railway Station on its own in a room at 7 Haymarket, in the theater district, behind a railing that kept the public back. Each visitor paid a shilling.
Inside, his staff kept the line moving past the picture. A man connected with the show called out that visitors could go by as often as they wished, "but you must not interfere with the general convenience by standing still."
At a Glance
Artist: William Powell Frith (1819 to 1909)
Painted: 1862
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 117 × 256 cm (46 × 101 in)
Where to see it: Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey
11. William Logsdail, St Martin in the Fields (1888)
A girl selling flowers stands on a pavement while the crowd moves past her in St Martin in the Fields, painted by William Logsdail in 1888. Behind her rises the church that gives the picture its name, at the edge of Trafalgar Square, the great open square at the heart of London.
Logsdail was 28, and he gave the girl a canvas nearly a meter and a half high. He had just come back from six years in Venice and was starting a series of busy street scenes set before the landmarks of London, of which this is the best known.
Working on a canvas that size outdoors, through a London winter, meant finding shelter at the edge of the square. Logsdail found an unusual one.